Balaji Srinivasan

And with the advent of the intranet,

over the last 10 years, really the last three years, essentially, speech has actually been freed for the first time in our lifetimes, because until, you know, essentially the 2010s, like, you know, there's that saying, freedom of speech belongs to those who, freedom of press belongs to those who own one, or never argue with a man who buys ink by the barrel, which meant that unless you had a newspaper that you inherited or a TV license,

or a radio license, all of which cost many millions of dollars, you could talk to your neighbor in the 80s or 90s, but nobody could hear you, right?

With the advent of social media and Twitter and blogs and so on and so forth, all these voices that previously had no distribution had distribution, which caused a cacophony and all of this kinds of chaos in the 2000s and 2010s and early 2020s.

And there was a counter-reaction that tried to censor all those voices and a counter-counter-reaction that uncensored them with Elon's purchase of X. And that has brought us to the present day.

And one of the consequences of that was the media was, though we didn't set out to do it, like Twitter set out to basically be tweeting breakfast, right?

Facebook set out to like share likes and poke people or what have you.

And those ended up disrupting classifieds and disrupted legacy media, disrupted print media.

There's a great graph of the print media disruption.

So as a consequence, imagine like a kid who just grows to be 6'6", 250 in an elevator and squashes everybody against the wall, right?

That's like what the internet was, right?

Where we just like grew and just added all of this, you know, muscle mass and we didn't mean to do it, right?

But we became really, really, really, really big and went from cute gadget makers and toaster makers to, in my view, the single most important force in the world that's still underestimated.

You know Orwell, right?

the, you know, the writer, obviously.

Yeah, so he had this saying, which is, it takes an enormous effort to see what is in front of one's own face.

And what's in front of our own face, basically every single moment of the working day.

The internet?

The internet.

That's right.