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PRINT OUT THE INTERNET Ok. Let me make it extremely concrete. Where did this giant sprawling datacenter come from? It was printed out from the Internet. Specifically, Zuck used the Internet to gather men, make money, organize materials, purchase territory, and shape it to advance Meta's goals. The principal such goal is, ultimately, the replication of Meta itself. This datacenter makes money in the cloud, which enables Zuck to purchase more land, which he repeats all over the earth. Think of it as viral growth, but in the physical world. Now extend that beyond Meta, towards any Internet tribe...such as your following. After all, where was your following built? Was it built one handshake at a time? No, it was built on the Internet. And where do you spend your time? Do you spend it convincing people in a small town? No, you probably spend it on the Internet. And where do you make your money, use your money, find your information, talk to your ideologically aligned friends? Again and again, the Internet. As Orwell said, to see what is in front of one's nose needs a constant struggle. The Internet is, right this moment, in front of your nose, as you're looking at your screen. Yet despite being the single most important force in the world, the thing that billions personally engage with for hours per day, the driving force that essentially didn't even exist in daily life just a few decades ago, perhaps the most popular thing humans have ever created...the Internet is still somehow underestimated. After all, the Internet is now much larger than America, with billions of users. The Internet is actually much wealthier too, as it's the only thing with global economic scale comparable to China. The Internet also now drives every single political and military event, from the initial Twitter-driven election of Trump and Brexit, to crypto and AI, to the advent of drone warfare. In fact, the Internet was in part built by America to outlive America. That's why Paul Baran of RAND proposed a packet-switched network, so that the Internet could resist a nuclear attack. ARPA eventually adopted the same blueprint on efficiency grounds. But Baran's initial idea remains important: even if the American state went down, the Internet's network would stay up. Concretely, what it means is that brilliant Americans designed a communications system that could survive even as everything else went down. So that we could restore America from cloud backup. We might need to draw on that property. We might need to print out the Internet, to organize social networks in the physical world, to gather peers together online to start building the societies we believe in offline. Because if we can print out a datacenter, we can also print out a new city. By the way, where is that Meta data center? Note that location doesn't really matter. You could start with any suitable green lawn with reasonable power costs, and then print out the datacenter from a blueprint. What mattered was the cloud community that had the will and capital to print out that datacenter. Today that cloud community is Meta, a tech giant. However, coordination costs are rapidly falling. So tomorrow it could be an internet community, perhaps organized around a coin, that isn't a traditional company at all. But if you're curious...the location was Ohio. Which means you can print out the Internet in Middle America too, if you want to. https://t.co/WhGg458QOQ Here's the citation on how Paul Baran of RAND proposed a packet-switched network that could survive a nuclear attack. His design was later adopted primarily for efficiency rather than resiliency purposes. But that initial property of resiliency persisted. In a deep sense, the network was designed to outlive the state. https://t.co/wgCAvupAHz