The Wild West

My generation is the first to grow up with the internet. We saw it in its infancy: AOL. We marveled at the speed and content of the world wide web, even in the bandwidth-starved, multimedia-free days of dial-up. We saw the dawn of file sharing with Napster, which precipitated intellectual property law into a tumult which I believe will not settle for years. Blogging, social networking, open-sourcing… the list of cultural phenomena created by this series of tubes goes on and on.

And all this has happened in the last ten or fifteen years.

Today, the internet is still pretty much unregulated. But what will happen in the future? Will internet law enforcement become commonplace? Will we look back on the 00's with nostalgia for the wild, untamed frontier, where you could gamble online, download movies without fear of being thrown in prison, or look at porn without having to digitally prove your identity? It's the wild west out there right now. How long will it take before the digital world as we know it evolves beyond recognition? Years? Decades? Centuries? I don't know, but I'm excited to stick around for at least a few decades to find out.

Whatever happens, our generation can say, "I was there when it all started."