The Internet’s explosion over the past 30 years has left many feeling like they’ve missed out on its pioneering heyday, and that it’s too late to get in on it. But founding executive editor of Wired magazine, Kevin Kelly, fully disagrees. “People in the future will look at their holodecks, and wearable virtual reality contact lenses, and downloadable avatars, and AI interfaces, and say, oh, you didn’t really have the internet (or whatever they’ll call it) back then.” In his op-ed piece on Medium, You Are Not Late, Kelly explains how the internet is still in its early infancy, and so much more is yet to come. That the getting’s not just good, he states, it’s better than ever. It’s especially interesting to read this in relation to his TED Talk from 2007, when the web was still less than 5,000 days (14 years) old: he made a similar claim about the web’s untapped potential, and proposed what might happen in the next 5,000 days of its life.
Well, we’re only halfway there and…