Balaji Srinivasan argues the Internet is a new continent where billions of people spend hours daily. With 3-4 billion active on platforms like Facebook, he says the digital shift rivals historical migrations and could birth new cloud-based countries with their own collective identities.
Foreign. You can think of the Internet as basically like giving rise to a new continent. Okay. Imagine an Atlantis that just arose out of the middle of the ocean, and people were just taking commuter flights there back and forth each day. Okay. So you'd spend eight hours in Atlantis and 16 hours at home. That's really what the Internet is. You know how I can prove that?
Well, we're in it right now.
Well, right, exactly. Like, one way of thinking about it is ask themselves, well, what percent of their time they spend, their waking hours do they spend looking at a screen of some kind? Okay. Whether it's laptop, mobile phone, tablet, you know, their smartwatch, something like that. Right. What percentage of that time is that for you, Steph?
I unfortunately have to say it's probably like 14 hours a day. But I'm. I'm probably in something like that. I'd say probably the average person, though, right? It's a third of their day, maybe eight hours.
That's right. So what that means. And that's up from basically zero in 1991.
Yes.
Right. So you know, this, this Atlantis, this cloud continent. Right. So just to extend the metaphor, we're taking these commuter planes up to the cloud continent 14 hours a day and coming back, and we're only spending two hours of our waking lives, in your case, on the land and 14 hours in the cloud. Right. From other people, it might only only be a few, like three or four hours. But, like, that's amazing. Billions of people have migrated huge chunks of their lives to this cloud continent. Okay. When I say billions, I mean like 3 something billion just on Facebook. Right. And you add all the people with smartphones and so on. So let's say it's on the order. 3,4 billion people in the world. Half the people of the Earth have. Are now spending half their lives in this cloud continent, half their waking hours, okay. Up from nothing in 1990, something. When we think about that, that is actually a different way of visualizing the whole thing. And you realize the Internet is actually on par with the discovery of the Americas for the Europeans, right? Yes, of course. There were people in the Americas before the Europeans got there. I talk about this in the book, actually, that, like, if you go and look at the Bantu expansion or the Mongols sweeping across the world, there's. There's essentially no ethnic group that has ever had some location since time immemorial. They just killed the previous folks and kind of took over their territory or whatever. Right. So leaving that whole part of things aside from the perspective of the Europeans, like, quote, the discovery of the New World was this, you know, huge thing. You know, similarly, like the folks who went over the Bering Strait, their discovery of the Americas was this huge thing. It was this new frontier, right? Is obviously thousands of years earlier. This Internet frontier where we've migrated to will, over time give rise to new countries just like the Americas did. Right? The. The Americas, the people came there and they didn't think of themselves as American or Brazilian or Mexican or Canadian or something like that. Nowadays, north and South America have. They're all European know, slotted into the same grid as like the old world. Right? But initially they thought of themselves as English or French or, you know, they were colonists. They were settlers, Right. They didn't identify with the new land as primary and the old world as secondary. Right. They didn't think of themselves as a Polish American or English American. Right? They thought, so it's just English. And that's similar to folks who spend all of this time in this cloud continent but have not made the flip. Right? You're spending the majority of your time in the cloud continent, but you're not thinking of yourself as a cloud person yet. First.
