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The Internet Is A Teenager
The internet may be 55 years old, but far from being in a mid-life crisis, it’s more like a teenager and that, is a wonderful thing.
Like any adolescent, it’s both brilliant and bafflingly daft. Both connecting families and democratising knowledge and the next day, amplifying conspiracy theories that would have any sane parent shaking their head. It can facilitate global trade but can’t remember your address from site to site. Just when regulators think they’ve set reasonable boundaries, someone finds a new loophole like a 16 year old discovering VPNs to bypass parental controls.
Once called an information superhighway, perhaps what we’re really dealing with is information superhormones. The internet may be 55 this year, but it’s behaving like a full-blown teenager. Perhaps that’s a better way to think of it. To realise it’s still more of a wild playground where the teachers have lost control. That may be a good thing.
On some days, this teenaged internet is bouncing around with high energy glee, pronouncing it will make the world a wonderful place, we will all live in abundance. The next it’s morose, barely grunts out a word, feeling doomed to surveillance capitalism and the defying its parents, the algorithms.
