How to Stop Worrying and Learn to Love the Internet

In honor of Towel Day, here is a look back at a prescient — a crazy-prescient — article by Douglas Adams in 1999:

1) everything that’s already in the world when you’re born is just normal;

2) anything that gets invented between then and before you turn thirty is incredibly exciting and creative and with any luck you can make a career out of it;

3) anything that gets invented after you’re thirty is against the natural order of things and the beginning of the end of civilisation as we know it until it’s been around for about ten years when it gradually turns out to be alright really.

…

We didn’t need a special word for interactivity in the same way that we don’t (yet) need a special word for people with only one head. … Interactivity.  Many-to-many communications.  Pervasive networking.  These are cumbersome new terms for elements in our lives so fundamental that, before we lost them, we didn’t even know to have names for them.

Worth a read.  Really.  Invest some time and read it, and remember one of the great minds and wits of the 20^th century.  And read it while holding your towel.  That brown stain?  It’s barbecue sauce.