You Don't Need to Know How It Works — And That's Exactly the Problem

This is not a post about AI. It is a post about what happens to people who never ask why. I was at a protest when someone told me the internet should be a human right. He was holding a four thousand pound laptop. Coffee in one hand. Earbuds in. Passionate, articulate, certain. I asked him what the internet actually is. He described Facebook. YouTube. Speaking to friends. I said: that is the world wide web. What is the internet? He looked at me. Then he said: what is the world wide web? I got scared. Not because he did not know. Because he was screaming about a thing he had never once tried to understand. What the internet actually is The internet is infrastructure. Physical cables, servers, routing systems that cost billions to build. The world wide web sits on top of it. The web is the passenger. The internet is the road. None of this is complicated. It takes about ten minutes to understand. But most people who depend on it daily have never spent those ten minutes. The gap between usi