Has the internet sidetracked us from greatness?

Yesterday we celebrated the 50th anniversary of Yuri Gagarin’s flight into space. Yesterday we celebrated the bravery of one man and the heroic effort of many to launch him into space. Our first step on the path to becoming intergalactic beings.

But that was yesterday, and today is today. And in the cold harsh light of sobriety, when we look around, we must realise that we have failed. So today I want to say sorry to Yuri.

Sorry, Yuri, but we have failed you. Somewhere along the line, we have cocked up. We have failed to make your dream come true. But it isn’t our fault. I blame the internet.

Yuri, I know, you probably weren’t the sort of guy to look for excuses, but the rest of us are just mere mortals, better at taking up space, than going to space, and we look for excuses. And the internet is the reason we have stumbled. We have been sidetracked from greatness by the fool’s paradise that is the life 2.0.

We used to break speed barriers, now we talk about download speeds. We used to do things for the glory, now we do things for the lulz. We used to fly planes, dream about the other side of the universe, now we count friends on Facebook. We marvel at how fast Charlie Sheen got to a million followers on Twitter, and make movies about people like Mark Zuckerberg. Fifty years they would have pitch your life as a screenplay, not some bell-end who was accused of stealing an idea and learnt how to monetise personal information.

A bunch of folks will scream: cut it with the analogue shitz, we’re living hivemind, digital side. But Yuri, I don’t know. Did YouTube make us who we are? Or did the people who got in little boats, walked into unknown jungles, climbed down holes and peered into the great abyss make us who we are? The technology that drives the internet is Nasa great. The thinking that powers it is Einstein brilliant. But has it delivered the goods like the apple that hit Newton on the head? Has it moved us forward in any real way? Yes, I can talk to millions like Ashton Kutcher. Or like a friend of mine did, make a video of his daughter talking about kittens, and become a worldwide sensation. I don’t want to take away from the video. It is brilliant, funny and super-cute, plus my mate did it, but maybe the 18 million collective minutes we spent watching it could have been put to better use. If you do the math, that’s about 34 years of human potential down the drain. Yuri, 34 years, you will understand the significance of that number. Because that’s how old you were when you died.

I’m sorry, Yuri, I shouldn’t bitch, I should just be trying to fix the problem, but I’m too busy writing an article on the internet. Goddamn.