The Internet is the New City

For careers and opportunity - all roads lead to the internet

There was a saying that all roads lead to Rome.

Rome was the center of the empire.

In Wikipedia, there is a saying - all articles lead to Philosophy.

If you click the first link in any Wikipedia article and keep following the first link, they eventually lead to the page about Philosophy.

The Philosophers dilemma is the idea that now you’ve studied Philosophy: What should you do for work?

I was surprised by how Philosophy majors are becoming more and more employable in the age of AI. It gives you an ability to judge, to think clearly.

All skills that are more important now.

In the digital age, in terms of careers and opportunity - all roads lead to the internet.

In the age of Industrial revolution - when people lost their jobs in farming - millions moved to the city looking for work.

In the age of AI, as people lose their opportunities, they are also moving somewhere.

And that place is the internet.

The internet is the city.

The more I think about the future of work the more I realise that all roads and solutions lead to the internet.

Create content.

Create an online store.

Solve problems for people.

Build a community in real life - through the internet.

So here we are on the internet.

The internet is the new city.

A place to learn.

A place to find opportunities.

A place to connect.

And it’s even more true because it exists at a higher level to cities.

I can be in any city and still connect with anyone on the internet.

It is the city of cities.

What is a city?

It comes from the Latin word: Civis which means citizen.

An inhabited place of greater size, population, or importance than a town or village. It is a complex, self-organizing node of high-density human interaction, communication, and resource exchange.

In this case the internet is of greater size, population and importance than a city.

And it might even make more sense to model our cities from the internet.

And it doesn’t even really matter where I am anymore.

Yes the place you are living matters - who you are around matters still, just like what kind of house you live in and which neighborhood you lived in, and who your neighbors were mattered.

So

If you are not using the internet to connect and grow your careers, you can still grow and improve, but you are not going to grow as fast as those that are using the internet.

So you will be falling behind.

That’s why the biggest and fastest growing companies are all digital and online companies.

Because the economics and connective ability of the internet is free.

But in the physical world there is friction.

So you’re paying a friction tax.

Yes, the real world is still useful and necessary.

Like we needed the farms to survive. But they are no longer a source of growth and opportunity.

They are a source of food and subsistence.

For most of the last 200 years, the majority of growth, the majority of the connections, and opportunities, happened in the cities.

In the next 200 years, the majority of the growth, connections and opportunities are going to happen on the internet.

There are similarities but there’s also a massive difference.

The difference is that new jobs started to form - the middle class started to grow. But the nature of the internet is different.

There is no middle class on the internet.

Rather than a middle class to fit into with set jobs to find and career pathways, there are long tail niches to fill.

A place you can build your unique category of one in a thousand niches.

The problem is that any change of this scale has massive challenges.

The move from the countryside to the cities was far from pleasant.

Many people were worse off.

And thats happening now.

And what solved it is that people came together to build new institutions to fill in the gaps, to solve these problems.

Huge numbers together led to sanitation and health problems - so they built sewers.

People were untrained, so they built training centers, the guilds, the trade associations.

People were exploited - so they built mutual-aid and collective-bargaining.

And thats what we need to do now.

Realise that attention is the labor of the new era.

That’s the currency of the internet, that these platforms rely.

And that’s something that we own.

And it’s much more valuable than most people think.

So we can come together to create solutions to our common problems by directing and coordinating our attention.

People are isolated, let’s build online communities that become offline.

People are struggling to retrain, let’s educate them to find opportunities.

The internet is the new city.

Our attention is the new currency.

Let’s build.

This is an example of emergence: