Plumbing vs Internet, Revisited
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Robert Gordon famously asked in 200026ya, ‘would you rather have indoor plumbing, or the Internet?’ He thought the answer was obviously ‘indoor plumbing’.
I agreed.
Having spent months without indoor plumbing due to Boy Scouts & camping, or power outages, I had to admit that while I enjoyed using AOL dialup and browsing random websites and AIMing my friends or talking about anime on IRC, in the wake of the dot-com bubble, the Internet had not actually changed my life that much, and that without the Internet, my daily life would be much the same.
I still did no shopping online (S&H was daunting, and every time I considered ordering a book from Amazon, I couldn’t justify it compared to my local Borders—which was fun to go to and browse books over some hot chocolate from the cafe), although I would soon experiment with eBay, I didn’t have the money to buy the collectibles that eBay was indispensable for, and so it remained a curiosity. Even my Sega Dreamcast, one of my few Internet-enabled non-PC devices, wasn’t actually hooked up to any Sega Internet services (too expensive & would take up the family phone line). The English Wikipedia did not exist, and one simply looked things up on an Encyclopedia Britannica or Microsoft Encarta (on one’s CD-ROMs, of course).
By 200521ya, while I still didn’t have a smartphone or many Internet uses we take for granted now, my own PC and cable modem broadband access had changed the situation. Amazon’s “Free Super Saver Shipping” had seduced me into online shopping for non-time-sensitive things; Xbox had taken the early-adopter potential of Sega Dreamcast and consoles would never again be offline; I had become a Wikipedia editor; and in general, everything was increasingly online-first and online availability of everything was ramping up rapidly, even if back-catalogues or older materials greatly outweighed online stuff. Then there was stuff like college classes—in such a hypothetical, would you even be able to graduate high school or college? Teachers by this point thought nothing of Internet-requirements, because, after all, you probably had a laptop, and if you didn’t, there was ample room in the increasingly empty school computer labs. And smartphones hadn’t even taken off!
So in 200521ya, I was no longer sure. On balance, if the Internet were frozen, at that instant I would probably have chosen ‘Internet’.
By 201016ya, there was no question. Kevin Kelly writes, from his Asian travels on 2013-01-01, that
…This area of Yunnan is consider one of the poorer areas in China, and the standard of living of the inhabitants here would be classified as “poor”. Part of the reason is that these homes have no running water, no grid electricity, and no toilets. They don’t even have outhouses. But the farmers and their children who live in these homes all have cell phones, and they have accounts on the Chinese versions of Twitter and Facebook, and recharge via solar panels.
…But as I just recounted, Option A [choosing toilets over 2002-era electronics] is not obvious at all. The farmers in rural China have chosen cell phones and twitter over toilets and running water. To them, this is not a hypothetical choice at all, but a real one. and they have made their decision in massive numbers. Tens of millions, maybe hundreds of millions, if not billions of people in the rest of Asia, Africa and South America have chosen Option B. You can go to almost any African village to see this. And it is not because they are too poor to afford a toilet. As you can see from these farmers’ homes in Yunnan, they definitely could have at least built an outhouse if they found it valuable. (I know they don’t have a toilet because I’ve stayed in many of their homes.) But instead they found the intangible benefits of connection to be greater than the physical comforts of running water. Most of the poor of the world don’t have such access to resources as these Yunnan farmers, but even in their poorer environment they still choose to use their meager cash to purchase the benefits of the 3rd revolution over the benefits of the 2nd revolution. Connection before plumbing. It is an almost universal choice.
In 200224ya, the choice was reasonably obvious. But somewhere before 201313ya, it flipped, even for Third Worlders: you’d be a fool to pick indoor plumbing if you were living any kind of normal existence! If you were a hermit living out in the desert or in the frozen wastes of Alaska, that’d be one thing, but any kind of ordinary suburban/urban lifestyle? Internet was too useful. Too many luxuries & necessities & jobs relied on it. (Forget the SaaS-ification of everything—you couldn’t even do FLOSS programming offline now, because you’d keep hitting problems like programs assuming they can install libraries at any time or the documentation removed in favor of online docs to save space.) There was still a debate over Gordon’s thesis, which was repopularized in 201115ya by Tyler Cowen’s The Great Stagnation, but it had subtly shifted to a more macro-economic claim about GDP—perhaps because increasingly more people were bluntly answering that they would pick the Internet over indoor plumbing.
By 201511ya, smartphones & Internet access had become so cheap that even homeless people in America often had them, and prized them above other uses of that money, like buying access to indoor plumbing. This is also true in Africa, China, and the rest of the first world.
It would be easier to list things that didn’t rely on Internet in 201511ya than ones which did—“the Internet was for porn”, yes, but the real meaning was not that “the Internet was (only) for porn”, but “the Internet was for porn (like everything else)”. By this point, even my relatives who eschewed Internet use were, in reality, relying heavily on it—simply outsourcing it to everyone else (having them do things on their smartphones, or the adult child who quietly took on ever more duties in the background).
In 201511ya, you could still lead a good, normal life without using the Internet, as long as you didn’t mind the occasional long phone call or traveling to buildings to transact in person… but the writing was on the wall. You could probably still do it for another decade or two, as non-Internet methods slowly withered away (assuming they ever existed), and if you were old enough, perhaps you wouldn’t bother learning, but three? Four? Five? If you were not too old, you gave up on any hipsterism or neo-luddism, and bit the bullet.
By the end of 2020, Gordon’s question was no longer asked, as COVID-19 made it all too clear how much of life was now mediated through the Internet, and how much of the unmediated life was that way out of inertia or organizational diktat. (A contrarian could still argue the point… but only because they would never face the choice. Even Alaskan life is now heavily dependent on the Internet, via Starlink, for everything from Facebook groups organizing seemingly all of Alaskan life to everyone preferring credit card payments over cash!)
And by 2025, no one remembered his question.