A few somewhat more controversial observations
Scientific researchers in recent years have had a lot of trouble keeping up with their fields simply because so much work is being done. But now, with publications available online and subject to sophisticated Computer search, the speed of advance will accelerate greatly. Instead of being buried in some obscure library, where it's impossible to access information even if You knew it existed, all the world's knowledge will be available through a few keystrokes. Contrary to popular opinion, science, not legislation, is the mainspring of human progress, and the Internet will result in a new flowering of science and technology.
I can see nothing but huge positives arising from the whole Internet phenomenon. If there are any negatives, they're trivial-, and they have nothing to do with the supposed "problems" you see and hear in the news. The media and the government, however, see the Internet only as a source of problems. To them the Internet is mainly a means for avoiding sales tax. Or a purveyor of pornography to kids. Or a conduit for information on how to create infernal machines. Or a disseminator of racist tracts. Or facilitator for organizing those with politically incorrect, or unpopular, views. Or a dispenser of advice and cheap prescription drugs for (horrors!) self-medication. Or ready vehicle for the distribution of alleged slander and outrageous rumor.
Of course all these things, and more, are true. But so what? Sales tax is simply a convenient form of State extortion; concerned citizens have always gone out of their way to deny it revenue. Pornography, dangerous blueprints, racist tracts, and the rest have always been readily available in books, magazines, and pamphlets. Those who blame the Internet today would have cursed the printing press in Gutenburg's time for the same reasons. These same people - and I despise them - tend to abhor any development that broadens the common man's options.
Like most great technological innovations, the Internet is an attack on the status quo; the Establishment can be counted on to fight it for the same reasons that medieval knights decried gunpowder as a work of the devil. All technology, especially if it's cheap, works to the benefit of the average man relative to those with privilege. Technology, not labor unions, is the reason we live as we do instead of grubbing for roots in the mud like our ancestors of only a few generations ago. Government, although it subsidized the Internet's development, would like to see the genie put back in the bottle. That's not just because the Internet makes it impossible for the State to control the exchange of information among people. It's not even because, when everybody starts using dual key escrow encryption, that they won't be able to track flows of money for tax purposes, or monitor communications. I believe that ultimately, but within a couple of generations, the Internet will help destroy the nation-state itself. And it's about time. The nation-state is an institution that, even in today's world, serves almost no useful purpose.
The idea of people aligning themselves based on the fact they live within some arbitrary political border is at once silly and destructive. Your peers and friends are peers and friends not because they are fellow Americans, Canadians, or what-have-you, they're your peers and friends because of shared interests, beliefs, activities, and values, not because you share the same ruler, or carry the same government issued papers. I have much more in common with friends I've made everywhere from Argentina to Zambia than I do with "fellow Americans" who live in the trailer park down the street. In fact, the main relationship I have to most people in the United States (if statistics saying a majority of Arnericans are net tax recipients are accurate) is that my tax dollars go to subsidize them. And that's a relationship I'd like to terminate. Only idiots feel loyalty because of the lowest common denominators of race or nationality or shared rulers; all these things are only accidents of birth.
What I'm saying will, of course, affront, and even incense, the nationalists among you. If so, spare me the letters of outrage that would otherwise accompany your cancellation request. Nationalism, as Einstein said, is the measles of mankind. It puts humans on the same par as a band of chimpanzees hooting and panting at a neighboring band. Of course, that may actually be an accurate analogy for most people. But I like to think the ascent of man may allow for out-rowing instincts that Are manifestly stupid.
I'll wager that within the lifetimes of many now living, you'll see people align themselves not in nations. which are anachronisms at best, but in groups that might be termed "philes" based on shared spiritual, philosophical, political, or other values. Political borders and shared nationality will have nothing to do with it. You may now have two, or 10, or 20 friends that some in might call "soulmates." What if it were possible to identify twenty million such people, choosing from every country on the planet? It will be. And as that reality quickly evolves, I think it's going to have gigantic political consequences.
But enough conjecture on the future. Back to the business at hand, which is either making a financial killing on Internet stocks or at least avoiding getting killed by them when the market inevitably crashes.
