If computers could talk...

If computers could talk to each other, we'd have a whole lot more data to work with. All of our data—everything that's ever been collected about us, everything that's ever been transmitted, everything that's ever been stored in a memory—would automatically be compressed and made into readable data.

So we might as well try to talk to each other. But we don't try to talk to each other as computers would. We try to talk to each other as computers would: on networked machines and on the computers of the people in power. To talk to each other would require taking the computer offline. (You can see that for yourself: it's like sending me into a dark room. I can see my neighbors without having to physically enter them.)

So the Internet has always been something different. It has a lot more data to work with, and it has a lot more control.