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The Internet isn’t about dot coms, online malls or customizable coupons. It’s not about routers, servers, browsers, or any of the other fascinating widgets and gadgets. It’s not about the business hype or the eye candy. It’s not about the toys. Nope. In fact, the Internet isn’t even about technology.
It’s about us. The collective us.
The real power of the Internet lies in the collective – the vital, thrilling interconnection of people and ideas that happens online. The juice that makes the Internet hum is the direct result of people talking, sharing, collaborating, aggregating, and playing. It’s the electric flow between five programmers on five different continents working together to track down the same elusive idea and hack it into an elegant and useful algorithm. It’s the snapshot of what we’re all thinking at any given instant: This Sucks. This Rules. It’s the sparks that fly when a million great ideas collide in one place. People. Connected. Commonspace.
Think for a second about some of the things that are happening right now:
Open source software, invented, constructed and maintained by loosely connected communities of programmers, is changing our whole notion of authorship and value. New companies are sprouting up out of nowhere, creating successful businesses by giving their software away – for free.
Business-to-business marketplaces are bringing together entire industries to help speed up the supply chain and make transactions more efficient – through collaboration. Companies that were formerly bitter rivals are banding together to create marketplaces that they hope will make their industry better for everyone involved.
Grassroots activists are organizing themselves in ways that were previously impossible – over the Internet. From Seattle to Prague, they’re creating a global equality movement that goes beyond tired ideas of right and left.
What do open source, B2B markets and online activism have in common? They certainly don’t have the same goals, and they don’t even use the same types of technology. The open source world uses its own powerful hand-built tools. B2B marketplaces use complex custom software packages written by the giants of the software industry. Activists use tiny, unsophisticated Web sites and e-mail lists to take on big companies and big governments. But the scale of the technology and the price tags attached to it aren’t what drive the success or failure of any of these ventures. The common thread – the compelling, exciting, factor that ties these phenomena together – is that people, connected online, produce interesting and unprecedented results.
Maybe this is obvious. But if it is, we as a society have developed a real knack for ignoring the obvious. Most discussion about the Internet lives in the past: it’s tied up with old-fashioned business ideas and breathless gushing over ‘way cool’ technology. It entirely misses the real story: communities and other types of human connections. If these are mentioned at all,