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Comment by nostrademons | Hacker News Reader

"The future is here. It's just not evenly distributed."

It's almost guaranteed that somewhere out there, the next big thing is incubating amongst a group of passionate enthusiasts who are certain it's the next best thing. It's just that most of humanity thinks they're crazy geeks.

That's what it was like with the Internet. I got on it in 1994 and couldn't convince anyone else it was worth paying attention to. By 1995, gifted & talented enrichment programs were starting to suggest all their students check it out. By 1996, I could convince my parents to pay for it. By 1998 a bunch of our family friends were putting their life savings into dot-coms.

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Maybe, I think the thing with that quote is that it's not always technology that is missing for things to get distributed. Technology, or affordable technology, has been missing for many things so far, but also organization. And I would say that the latter is increasingly the case, since technology is developing faster than we can make use of it. Last years smart phone processor is almost already obsolete, but it's a supercomputer for anything else.

I think the things that are going to get distributed in the next decade have already been invented and are just waiting to get organized. Much like the dotcom boom for that matter. Shopping online? So silly! People say that software is eating the world, but it's more like that software and the world is struggling to catch up with the opportunities provided by hardware.

So let's make a list of all of the things that have a group of passionate enthusiasts who are certain it's the next big thing. I can only think of two things:

* Bitcoin

* Self driving vehicles

Smart home. Virtual reality. Drones. Smartwatches (yes, some people still really like theirs). Rust. AI. IPFS. Federated wikis.

Probably others too. The scale that we're talking about is ~1000s of people, not millions. This doesn't even register in the news media - hell, HN probably has close to a few thousand people online at any given time, and there are 1000s of forums like Hacker News on the Internet.

I wish I could frame this comment in gold.

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