The Breakthrough of the roaring ‘20s
This post is a product of a brief afternoon walk-and-talk with Grok. Yes, you can do that now—welcome to the future.
Here’s the core idea: the rapid technological progress we’re witnessing isn’t solely driven by Generative AI or you-name-it trending tech on the Gartner Hype Cycle. It’s way simpler that.
We’ve reached a point where the Internet brings maximum value and society is reaping the benefits of it. The infrastructure is there and we can boost collaboration and creativity to maximum on the shoulders of giants.
Remember the ol’ days of Netscape? I do not clearly, but the accent is following - there was tons of friction (discouraging, duh…) with uncertain payout (quite limited information).
Now, as of 2025, all pieces of the puzzle seem to be in place.
- The backbone is there - datacenters, undersea cables, all the things that need to be there to keep bits flowing 365/24/7.
- Access is easy-enough for mainstream adoption - even if you buy cheapo second hand device, it is slow, but not painfully so. No need to think about OS licenses, CDs, drivers. Pair it with your favourite cheapo (unlimited 5G all over the world) or not so (Starlink) method to access the Internet and you’re good to go.
- Cybercrime has shifted towards corporate targets. There was a moment in time where I had anxiety touching computers, just because the instant you plugged in an Ethernet cable the device became infected and unusable.
- Other critical services: free video calls, compliance and Identity verification procedures, virtual collaboration workspaces (Office software, Github for code, Notion), payment rails (Stripe, Bitcoin), marketplaces, SaaS and other kind of services.
- Knowledge is preserved, uploaded and produced in digital-first way
As a result, things that have not been possible before have became such. Armed with some satoshis (it’s up to you how to get them) you can access any kind of physical or digital product. Even if you didn’t know it existed beforehand. Most of the knowledge is free and, more importantly - available. I’ve heard horror stories from my parents and peers waiting months to get their hands on Russian textbooks and then, in case they are lucky and have copier machine in their town - copy them. Most of the people with capital and ideas are accessible (public or anon profiles on X). These people can communicate over instant DMs and work together. AMD has built state-of-the art hardware, but has poor drivers and software support? No worries, a guy in India or George Hotz himself will start a company around that. There is an open source code for any task and the hardware to run has low barrier to entry if executed correctly (Cloud Providers). Few years ago, even if you were dealing with volume, you could not easily obtain the infrastructure or a person skilled enough to build architecture good-enough to handle it. And lastly, despite my opinion on LLMs, you have a somewhat useful assistant available at any time to unblock thought process or just rewrite your emails in a more polite language.
I’m not writing a conclusion. It is a synergy of things that have happened on the Internet. We’re almost there, but generally - we’ve unlocked the way to progress fast. Let’s see how it turns out.