“He who makes half a revolution digs his own grave,” said Saint-Just.

One of the major surprises I received when I moved out of childhood into the real world, was the degree to which the world is stratified by genuine competence.

This was the point at which I realized that my child prodigy license had officially completely expired.

No, even worse than that, much worse than that: these CEOs and CTOs and hedge-fund traders, these folk of the mid-level power elite, seemed happier and more alive.

But entering the real world, I found out that the average mortal really can't be an executive.  Even the average manager can't function without a higher-level manager above them.

But entering the real world, I found out that the average mortal really can't be an executive.  Even the average manager can't function without a higher-level manager above them

Someone who can be an executive at all, even a below-average executive, is a rare find.

I tried—once—going to an interesting-sounding mainstream AI conference that happened to be in my area.  I met ordinary research scholars and looked at their posterboards and read some of their papers.  I watched their presentations and talked to them at lunch.  And they were way below the level of the big names.  I mean, they weren't visibly incompetent, they had their various research interests and I'm sure they were doing passable work on them.  And I gave up and left before the conference was over, because I kept thinking "What am I even doing here?"

There's "smart" and then there's "smart enough for your cognitive mechanisms to reliably decide to sign up for cryonics".

It's a standard idea that people who make it to the elite, tend to stop talking to ordinary mortals, and only hang out with other people at their level of the elite.

And it really was both new and cool to use a 1-frame-a-minute webcam to spy on a coffee machine on another continent or click a Big Red Button That Does Nothing.

Back then, we didn’t have platforms or feeds or social networks or… blogs. We had homepages.

There were no databases to configure. No scripts to install. No plugins, no security patches. There were no cookies. No iframes, no web-first scripting languages, no web apps.

A well-organized homepage was a sign of personal and professional pride

Dates didn’t matter all that much. Content lasted longer; there was less of it. Older content remained in view, too, because the dominant metaphor was table of contents rather than diary entry.

That’s what they were called then… web diaries. (The name weblog came a few years later, as some of their writers moved away from extremely personal topics.)

Each would-be Netizen had to bushwhack their own path.

You didn’t reload a homepage every day in pursuit of novelty. (That’s what Netscape’s What’s Cool was for!)

Not everyone had the desire to publish their angsty poetry, sexcapades, or surfing habits on a daily basis; the other limiter on chrono-content was the sheer time and energy it required. Diarying was a helluva lot of work.

Suddenly people weren’t creating homepages or even web pages, but they were writing web content in form fields and text areas inside a web page.

Suddenly, instead of building their own system, they were working inside one.