Why I Love the Internet, Pt. 1

Over the past few years, like nearly everyone I know, I have found that the internet has become a vital resource for just about anything and everything. When I refer to “anything and everything”, I mean any random or obscure item, thought, detail, instruction, photo, or anything else that I cannot bring to mind right now. The scope of it can be nauseating, but in the good way…like a roller coaster. Personally, I don’t care for roller coasters all that much, but I’ll assume that you do.

I came to this realization of the grand scale of the information held on the internet a few years ago when I was first learning how to fix elements of my car. I tracked down the owner’s manual but it had complicated and hard-to-follow instructions for how to make the repairs. So then, out of desperation, I looked my problem up on YouTube and I found a dirty amateur mechanic making a badly-lit video in his garage of how to deal with my exact problem. This blew my mind. It was too perfect and so incredibly specific. This wasn’t some algorithm that presented me with an ad for some shoes based on the previous shoes that I bought. This was an exact solution (or at least step-by-step instructions) to a particular problem that popped up out of the swirling randomness of the universe. This is is the dizzying “grand scale of information” I was referring to, any problem I could think to search for led to someone who had already dealt with it…and filmed a video or built a website or posted a comment where they explained how you can deal with it too. I was immediately reminded of a scene from Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure where Bill and Ted are outside a police station trying to figure out how to free various historical figures from their jail cells and they devise the following plan…

Any problem that Bill and Ted face has already been dealt with previously by their future selves. The “future selves” in my case is the dirty mechanic in his dimly lit garage, but hopefully you get the idea.