In my industry we talk a lot about the "internet of things," which refers to the way the web has worked itself into the fabric of our lives.
I work in digital strategy, which means I’m literally always on the Internet. I also naturally think in phrases. Lately I can’t stop thinking about this phrase:
The internet of people. Not knowing whether or not I’d just invented this thing or someone had already trademarked it, I Googled the phrase — and, of course, it’s a cryptocurrency.
Next I found a peer-reviewed scholarly research article with the exact phrase — the Internet of People. It was…a little out of my pay grade.
There might be more out there, but I didn’t scroll past the first page of Google because, well, people don’t do that.
Trust me, I’ve looked at the numbers.
I’m 23 years old, which means that I’ve never really lived in a world without the Internet. I mean, I’ve been through all of it: Formspring. /b/. Livejournal. Finstas. Even Reddit’s Random Acts of Amazon, where you can make friends with total strangers and mail them things on Amazon for no reason.
When I was in elementary school, I’d log on to my grandparents’ desktop every weekend. Once, I got kicked out of an KOL chatroom and had to hack into my mom’s email to delete the message from the moderator.
Whoops, I think I just told her that for the first time. Sorry, 
Turns out, you can’t curse in KOL chatrooms — even if you do it in Wingdings.
(Since when do Wingdings include landscapes?)
In middle school, though, the Internet got crazy. In middle school, we had MySpace.
MySpace. The most beautiful playground of human creativity. Everything about MySpace was created for human expression. You make music? Upload it. You like glitter? Here’s a code to make glitter rain from your page while you scroll. You’re pretentious and don’t want anyone to know what Say Anything song you’ve embedded into your profile? Here’s a code to hide your music player.
Image via Free MySpace Layouts
But MySpace didn’t just change our self-expression, it changed the way we interacted with the people around us. You could have one relationship with someone IRL, and a totally different relationship online.
Now, I watch as my 13-year-old sister lives her entire life online. She's been taking selfies since she was born. She speaks in memes.
And right now, on Al Gore’s Internet, I can write this blog with no editorial guidelines or approval, upload it to a network with less than 50 followers, and still share this thing I was thinking about on my couch with the world.
That’s incredible.
What we’re doing on the Internet feels, to me, like an active archival of our lives -- and, by result, our society.
I don’t know if anybody else thinks about it as much as I do, but I think about it all the time. I think it’s really beautiful that I’ve created tiny, microscopic universes for myself my entire life.
I believe in a perfectly human, anecdotal Internet, where jokes that you tweet out into total void can eventually land you a TV show. I believe in Vine stars getting married, and I think it’s a really incredible thing to be exactly as old as I am now. I love the Internet so much it literally drives me crazy.
It’s worth thinking about how much data we willingly hand off to this giant, undefinable cloud-thing.
Net neutrality is necessary to maintaining our modern way of life. Without totally transparency about who controls the Internet (hint: it has to belong to us), our way of life (and my career) could be totally lost.
There was a third thing I found on the first page of Google — this article from 2015, written by Jenny Judge and Julia Powles.
"The internet has become such an ubiquitous part of our lives that we tend to forget that it is in its infancy. It’s still just a crude prototype of what it could be. The internet of the future doesn’t have to be like the internet of today: flat, monopolised and dangerously opaque. Its form, contours and feel are still, quite literally, up for grabs.”
This quote reminds me so much of what I see happening here on Steemit. I'm so glad there are people out there as interested in redefining the Internet as I am, people who love the Internet enough to know that it can be better than what's being offered to us right now.
The internet is the people.
Don’t let bots convince you otherwise.
Cover image via Smashing Lists
P.S. I originally wrote this as a video script...should I record it? Comment below and let me know what you think! :)
