Internet
The Internet is humankind's greatest creation, growing 1500x at a 25% CAGR, and journeying beyond our solar system.
When we began building the Internet in 1994, it had only 21M people on it.
Today, it’s used by 30B entities, including 3/4ths of the human population and tens of billions of machines, with the number continuing to grow exponentially.
The Internet powers the daily operations of our planetary-scale spaceship, and it has traveled to other planets before humans. It is the first thing we created that has journeyed beyond the edge of our solar system.
In 33 years, the Internet grew nearly 1500x at a 25% CAGR.
Not bad for a 13-year old Iowa boy hacking a Gateway 2000 computer.
The mission has always been to help people by putting food on the table, learn new skills, become sovereign, and reach new heights as the master of their own domain.
Unfortunately, the dark side took hold of many builders, where they doubled-down on incentives misaligned with our mission. Money, power, influence, and attention took over control, and as a result, negative core values were embedded deep within the Internet's sediment.
Today, humankind finds itself at another precipice. We’ve released emerging tech that is out of our control, which is the first time that's happened.
Pandora’s box has been opened, and there’s no going back.
So what do we do?
As I see it, we only have two primary paths forward:
- Stay helpless: we already feel powerless as individuals to do anything that can impact the current momentum. So we give up or give in, let the existing system keep going, and deal with the consequences as they arise. In short, reactionary. We ride the wave, come what may.
- Do something: each of us has power and control over our thoughts, our interactions, our time, money, energy, and attention. We can collectively choose to invest these god-given natural resources into things that compound in a positive direction. No matter where we end up, we’re at least better off individually and together.
I choose the latter.
We can think one moment longer than we used to. We can still get a financial return, but we can choose to put that money into the people, assets, and companies that have stronger core values. We stop investing in companies and people with weak core values that hurt humanity.
What’s a simple mechanic for this?
- Same trigger
- Different action
- Same or better outcome
Which people you listen to, where you spend your ad dollars, the content you spend time watching, the companies you acquire, the people you fund, and the products you create each determine the outcome we all have to live with.
Karma is real, but perhaps not in the way it’s been classically described. Everything in this universe is connected, borrowing energy to create excitations of a field. Eventually that ripple ripples back on you.
You get back what you put out. So stop punching yourself in the stomach and let's get to work.
—Sean