Internet has enabled and improved connectivity, mobility, affordability, collaboration, and open-source mindset. Those following topics are more or less linked to those principles.
Virtually infinite video and music content, affordable if not free
Youtube content is enormous in size. Everyone can upload, from amateur hobbyist, to video professional. Spotify, Apple music, and other streaming services offer million of tracks, right at our fingtertips.
Filtering the content we like can be challenging, but once we find quality content, we can subscribe, like and and bookmark the channel and reward the author.
Youtube is monetizing views, creating a feedback loop. It surely encourages clickbait for get-rich-quick minded youtuber. But it also rewards people who do not seek directly the views but still get them because they produce quality content, useful for the viewers.
Wireless, radio wave data transport, Internet everywhere
Remove wires and be free to move! Invisible waves flow through the air and transport data silently and seamlessly. This is elegant and very convenient. We gain incredible mobility. Browsing the Internet in planes is the cherry on top. We reached peak mobility and connectivity.
Immersive worlds and photorealistic games
The Cyberpunk 2077 game's Night City is immersive and interesting. Its has beautiful cityscapes and splendid interior design. The Hitman games also have incredible and various scenes and locations. Hitman 3 has a level playing out in Chongqing, China.
On the other hand, the Unreal Engine 5 enables photorealistic environment and games, such as the Matrix city. All of this leads to
Human knowledge expanding continuously
We benefit from people dedicating their life to expand human knowledge. For example, the Nobel prize, the Field Medal, the Turing reward the most significant breakthrough in science and other domains. I feel grateful when I read the list of awardees and I think they should get more credits.
Of course, the human knowledge is huge and one cannot know everything due to our short lifetime. The challenge is to find what we want to know among this ocean of knowledge.
Open source, collaborative, free software, tools and information
Linux distributions are free and stable operating systems that are continually improved. More generally, open-source software is the foundations of many projects. To make this website, I only pay for the domain name. The CMS has a free-tier (Contentful community plan) and Netlify, as the host, also offers a free plan.
Wikipedia is one the humanity greatest achievement. It follows the open-source mindset: free to edit and free to use. It's a feat of strength on its own. While it's already very complete in some aspects, it still lacks some niche topic explanations. Some academics should contribute more to Wikipedia and stop seeing it as a competitor and/or stop blaming its shortcomings, as it's a community effort and they could contribue instead.
Hardware improvement and miniaturization
Apple new M1 CPU is the combination of the TSMC process improvement with the new ARM CPU architecture. We get more compute with less power and less heat. The Moore law is not dead yet and seeing such dramatic efficiency increase in 2022 is a big rejoicing moment.
We could say the same about the smartphones's camera improvement that has been drastic over the years. Taking pictures with the iPhone 13 is a joy and the colors are beautiful.