The internet is getting faster and more volatile

The internet is getting faster and more volatile.

Obviously, every year new technology is released that enables more storage, faster computation, and better distribution of the various signal (and noise) that makes up the global communication stack.

This means more conversations (and arguments), with more people, more of the time.

Nodes that would have never interacted previously can now interact… all the time

and indeed these nodes are often algorithmically manipulated to interact more and thus drive engagement on the various ad revenue behemoths that shape the digital discourse.

What’s less obvious is that the rate of change is increasing too.

That means instead of things getting faster like this.

Things are getting faster like this.

This is a function of the cool math of social interaction.

Adding 1 person to a social or interest graph doesn’t just mean 1 incremental addition.

It means 1 incremental set of activities that interact with the entire existing graph and reflexively influence the behavior of everyone and everything already there.

And since the internet is just one giant meshwork of social and interest graphs…

We get this crazy, chaotic behavior that gets increasingly more so over time - in lockstep to both the onboarding of people to the internet and the technology that facilitates that onboarding.

But beyond the tech there’s an unexplored reality at the fringes of our awareness…

So while recognizing there are some physical limits on improving our current hardware, we should acknowledge that culturally we have plenty of room to speed tf up.

Political elections are glacially paced choices between quinquagenarians that learned how to use Netscape in their thirties.

70% of the planet was born before you could play videogames on the internet with strangers.

We just got access to high quality, performant video streaming on our phones 5 years ago.

Combine this legacy system hangover, the nascent youth turbo-culture bomb, and the fact that more people are working on more problems with more individual leverage than ever before in the history of technology…

We’re on a bullet train that has just barely left the station.

So buckle up.

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