nothing is sacred on the internet

there is this great song by 'clipping.' called 'nothing is safe' where the lyrics go along the lines of 'nothing is sacred, nothing to pray for, nothing is safe' - it's an incredible song and it leads me to sacredness and immutability.

i've been thinking a lot about immutability, and more specifically the internet, and the way the internet devours basically every medium that it comes across.

i think the internet has this unique ability, and it has had it since its inception. the internet allows for greater freedom than any other place and any other time in the world, really, because one of the biggest consequences of connecting everyone together in this inter-meshed network, where every country is now connected to each other and people from all walks of life are interacting with each other, is the free sharing of information that happens with it.

and with the free sharing of information comes the breaking of everything that people hold sacred.

there are a lot of things that people hold sacred, and those things are devoured by the internet one by one. we saw it happen with music when napster was really popping off. we saw how it shook the music industry to its core. they had to shut it down, of course, but we also saw the democratization of music.

and what that did was give anyone access to it. a person like me, who grew up deep in the himalayas with no access to these vast libraries or cultural centers where i would be introduced to new music or art in general, was suddenly given access to all of this. and not just music, for that matter. films and art too.

i shouldn't be as cultured in the arts as i am, because the place that i come from has no real repertoire, or rather repository, of all these things. but yet i am. and that's all because of the internet.

i was exposed to the internet through this government-owned bsnl connection, landline dial-up internet initially, then broadband, and now we have fiber and all this other stuff there. because of that, i suddenly had this immense wealth of information available to me.

i was able to watch films and engage in discussions with people from around the world. i wasn't talking much, but i was sure lurking around, seeing how different cultures reacted. in the beginning, i was mostly learning stereotypes about different cultures, for sure, but then i started really getting to know the nuances, in a naive way, behind all these different cultures and all these different people who hail from different walks of life and, more importantly, different cultures.

i, as a kid in my village, was able to watch films from all around the world. i was able to listen to music from around the world. i was able to cultivate this culture of mine, and that was all because nothing was sacred on the internet.

there was nothing that was not available after two clicks, right? sure, there might be some content that is paywalled, but bypassing that paywall is child's play. it really requires only a few clicks to get around something like that.

and i think that was one of the biggest things that drew so many people to the internet.

the internet allowed unprecedented access to everyone about basically everything they could have ever wanted to know. and to this day, i'm still sometimes taken aback by it. even though, of course, we are all so used to the internet now, i still find myself taken aback by this wizard-like, magical, titanium-coated thing that i hold in my hand, which is my phone.

this thing has access to everything ever. every film ever made, every song ever made, every book that i ever wanted to read is on there. articles, information about basically anything i could have ever wanted to know, it is all sitting inside this small brick, and i am able to have access to it all the time.

and yet most of us have started to develop a negative association with the internet, especially because of the addictiveness of social media apps. for some people it's gaming, for others it's something else entirely. and in all of that, i think we often forget the real draw of these devices and this technology, which is the democratization of everything.

everything is possible on the internet.

the internet allows us access to everything, and that's why i keep saying it's magic. it is nothing short of magic. it is this magical thing that has given me some of my best friends in my life, that has given me this immense wealth of information, and that has developed me as a person. that sounds pretty crazy to say out loud, but it is true.

and what it has also taught me from a very young age is that nothing is sacred.

i keep coming back to nothing is sacred because, on the internet, nothing really is. there is almost nothing that is not accessible on the internet, and that cuts both ways.

on one side of it, there are so many wonderful things. there is art, information, books, knowledge, music, films, communities. all these things that i keep mentioning. on the other side of it, there are also horrible, disgusting things available on the internet because, genuinely, nothing is sacred.

this is the place where you are able to get everything you could have ever wanted, and that does not mean that everything you find there is good for you.

you can very easily be pulled into the manosphere and live your life as a misogynist, or become racist, or spend the rest of your life believing things you were indoctrinated into by the internet. and the internet is powerful enough to indoctrinate you in a way that you may never really be able to escape.

at the same time, it can make you a wonderfully well-educated, well-rounded person.

and both of these things are mainly allowed by the same thing: democratization.

but what does democratization actually do?

one major part of democratizing something for everyone is breaking down all the barriers that exist in the way. and breaking down those barriers also means not necessarily respecting copyright as such, not respecting paywalls, and not respecting the so-called “ethical” ways of getting stuff.

we have already seen this happen with music. part of what happened was that people's natural instinct became: i shouldn't have to pay for music in this way. if i'm owning something physical, sure, i should pay for the music. but i should not have to keep renting it digitally.

we saw the same thing happen with films. on the internet, torrents became one of the main ways people watched films outside of going to the theater, obviously. people would torrent films and watch them at home.

streaming services became this little add-on on top of that. netflix and the likes would give you all this content for a relatively small price, which was basically a convenience fee. instead of torrenting everything, organizing the files, finding subtitles, dealing with bad rips or whatever else, you could just pay a little bit and have everything sitting there ready for you.

but now that streaming itself has become this massive billion- and trillion-dollar industry, it has also pushed people back toward piracy again.

and the same thing has not really happened with software so far.

for a very long time, there were several companies with billion-dollar businesses built around the fact that the closed-source software they had was simply very capable. the closed-source software they had was good enough to do a lot of shit, and because software was difficult to develop, these companies had an unprecedented moat. they were able to exploit that moat because replicating what they had built was genuinely difficult.

but now ai has started making a lot of that go away.

and i think this is truly a watershed moment.

every day on my feeds, i see some new piece of software being decompiled, reverse-engineered, recreated, or rebuilt in a fraction of the time it would have taken before. even things that were treated as almost impenetrable are suddenly starting to look much less permanent.

the ps5 is one example that keeps coming to mind. it has very famously been seen as extremely difficult to crack. and, of course, every real developer knows that nothing is truly impenetrable, but the ps5 really did feel like one of those systems that would hold for a very long time.

and now we are seeing work around decompilation, recompilation, and native approaches that go far beyond simply emulating the console. the important thing to me is not even the technical specifics of that one project. it is the fact that this kind of work is happening while the console is still in the middle of its main life cycle.

a lot of people have been rejoicing about things like this because sony chose to move further away from physical media, so to them it feels like some kind of payback.

but i think it cuts deeper than that.

i think it cuts into the general state of software itself.

if software can now be made in the magnitude of days instead of months, years, and sometimes decades, then what really is the moat for all of these companies?

all these it companies offering a thousand different saas products, what the fuck do we need them for?

what the fuck do they really provide for us anymore?

if a saas product that once required an entire company to build can now be made at home in a few days, what the fuck do we really need that company for anymore?

and that is where this democratization becomes much bigger than piracy, copyright, streaming, or access to media.

because if the internet broke down the barriers around information, music, films, books, and culture, then ai might be beginning to break down one of the last major barriers that still remained intact: the ability to make the software itself.

and that democratization is going to directly impact a huge part of the tech-oriented world that we see today.

i touched on some of this in my previous writing, where i was trying to understand the broader trend around developers and what the world might look like as we move into this ai-first era.

but a lot of that was really about the trend of the industry itself. the perspective was more focused on developers and engineers, and their relationship with the industry around them.

now i want to briefly look at the world in general, because software has been a big, big, big driving factor behind entire nations.

the united states has had an enormous advantage on the software side. almost all of the biggest tech companies emerged out of america, and, ironically enough, most of the big frontier ai companies are also situated there.

but now the tools these ai companies have built are starting to make parts of the software world that america dominated look increasingly redundant.

take something like the microsoft 365 bundle. there are services inside it that allow you to manage your team, communicate with them, have video calls, share information, and do all the other shit that companies have gradually come to depend on.

but if the specific functionality i need from that bundle can be coded with the help of codex or claude code or whatever the fuck else you want to use in two or three days, then i can suddenly have my own local alternative to the thing they are charging me a subscription for.

so why wouldn't i do that?

why would i rely on their infrastructure when i could just make mine?

because, again, my need is not necessarily as massive as the need of some company with 5,000 employees. i don't need to replicate the entirety of microsoft 365. i only need to replicate the tiny slice of it that actually matters to me.

and even that company with 5,000 employees might start seriously considering whether it makes sense to keep paying for all of this forever.

maybe instead they hire two engineers. maybe five. maybe they give those engineers ai tools and let them replicate the parts of the stack that the company genuinely needs, service the whole thing in-house, and suddenly have sovereignty over their own data as well.

why the fuck would you not at least consider doing that?

if that is where we are headed, then software starts to look like one of the last frontiers for the internet to really capture.

and ai itself is being democratized in exactly the same way, by the way.

we now have these incredible open-source and open-weight models coming out which, of course, sometimes lag a generation behind the frontier labs. companies like openai and anthropic usually have these big-ass frontier models that are closed, and you have to pay to get meaningful access to them.

but then people distill them.

there are labs in china and elsewhere taking the capabilities of these massive models, finding ways of compressing or recreating large parts of that capability, and then releasing models much more openly.

and i think the act of taking something like that, distilling it, and giving it back to everyone is maybe the most apt description of what the internet has always been about.

the internet has always been about capturing this massive amount of value that somebody tried to contain and then finding some way of giving it to the people for free.

music did it.

films did it.

books did it.

information did it.

software is beginning to do it.

and now we are watching it happen to ai itself.

which raises a pretty obvious question: if ai itself is being democratized, how long does the moat of these ai companies really last?

there has been a lot of talk about pacing the frontier, about staying six months ahead, a year ahead, whatever it might be. the assumption is that if you continue producing the best model in the world, you continue having the advantage.

but does pacing the frontier really help if somebody can take that big frontier model, distill what matters from it, and produce something that is maybe 95 percent as capable?

if the frontier model is dramatically more expensive, closed, gated, and controlled, while something that gets you 95 percent of the way there can run locally or be accessed basically for free, how valuable is that remaining five percent to most people?

does pacing the frontier really help at that point?

this might sound like peak ai psychosis to a lot of people who are probably rolling their eyes at this point, going, “oh yeah, sure, man. the world is going to change with ai.”

but i don't really have a horse in this race.

there is no horse of mine here. i don't particularly need one version of the future to win over the other in order for this argument to work.

i just think the internet is reaching something close to its final frontier, and software remains one of the last major things that was never democratized enough.

because even though there have always been great open-source alternatives to these massive closed-source products, there were still things for which you simply needed the closed-source version.

photoshop is the obvious example.

photoshop is used by almost every serious creative i know, even though alternatives have existed forever. gimp has existed in the linux and open-source community for a very long time. there are other tools too. but ask a creative who actually gets real work done and, a lot of the time, they still have to use photoshop because it simply has features, workflows, integrations, or capabilities that are not matched somewhere else.

the same goes for a lot of software.

there are people who would much rather use an open-source alternative, but they simply can't, because there are things that these closed-source products provide that the alternatives don't.

but increasingly, what i see on my feed are people attempting things that would have sounded completely absurd not very long ago: massive pieces of software being decompiled, rewritten, recreated, or recompiled into completely different languages and environments.

i've seen people claiming to have rebuilt huge parts of software stacks in rust. photoshop, premiere pro, spotify-like clients, all sorts of things.

and of course, when something crosses copyright lines or directly reproduces proprietary software, the companies involved are going to come after it. there will be takedowns, litigation, cease-and-desist letters, repositories disappearing, domains going offline, whatever else.

but the power of the internet has always been that once something truly spreads, you can never really make it disappear again.

you can take down the original repository.

you cannot take down everybody who cloned it.

you cannot take down every torrent.

you cannot take down every copy sitting on somebody's hard drive.

you cannot make the knowledge disappear.

games are another example.

i've watched people do completely ridiculous things with games that used to require dedicated hardware. i saw someone running gta v through a browser. we're talking about a game that once represented the upper end of what consumer hardware could reasonably run, and now we're living in a world where games of that scale can be streamed, translated across architectures, run on handhelds, and brought into places they were never designed to exist.

that shift in itself is kind of insane.

the same thing applies to software people pay thousands of rupees for, or hundreds of dollars for every year, sometimes every month.

and again, what interests me is not merely the existence of an open-source alternative that gets 70 percent of the way there.

what interests me is the possibility that the distinction between “alternative” and “real thing” starts getting blurrier and blurrier.

i saw somebody rebuild a spotify-style client in rust that supposedly used a fraction of the memory footprint of the actual electron app.

and that is exactly the kind of thing i'm talking about.

the internet looks at something that has accumulated years of complexity, corporate structure, pricing, subscriptions, lock-in, technical debt, and value capture, and somebody somewhere goes: why?

why does it have to be this way?

why does this app need this much memory?

why do i need this subscription?

why can't i run this locally?

why can't i own my data?

why can't i rebuild the part i actually need?

why can't this just be free?

and increasingly, the answer is: maybe it can.

so, in conclusion, the internet is wizardry.

this whole technology is wizardry.

and i think we are entering one of the final phases of that wizardry, where a lot of the value capture that companies have built around software starts disappearing in front of our eyes.

because some of that value capture, the billions of dollars in stock prices, the enormous valuations, the assumption that some piece of software will remain defensible forever, might not actually be as defensible as we thought.

because the internet is a magical place.

the internet is a place where everything gets democratized and nothing is sacred.

nothing is sacred.

and there is also this massive communal attribute to the internet that people often forget.

at its heart, at its core, the internet is about community.

honestly, it's baffling that the internet even exists.

what is the internet at its core?

it's a gigantic mesh of networks operating across international borders, through countries with completely different governments, laws, ideologies, censorship regimes, and firewalls.

and yet it runs through all of them.

these places are physically connected by gigantic cables running underneath our oceans.

that's the internet.

the internet is what happened when a research technology escaped the boundaries it was designed inside and was deployed across the entire world.

and now the internet is basically the consciousness of the zeitgeist.

the internet is not just a place where you buy products online, even though that is part of it.

it is the zeitgeist now.

what works on the internet increasingly translates into what works offline. culture moves from the internet into the real world and back again. careers are made there. reputations are destroyed there. political movements form there. art gets discovered there. entire industries move according to what people on the internet decide they care about.

if you are not legible to the internet in some way, increasingly, shit simply doesn't work out for you.

and as much as i sometimes want to shoot every electronic device i own and move into some remote cottage somewhere, it is undeniable that this is a wonderful technology.

it is honestly the zeitgeist in material form, quietly processing thousands and millions and billions and trillions of pieces of information every fucking moment.

and the fact that you, sitting wherever the fuck you are, can read this the day i post it, or a week after that, or maybe ten years after that, is entirely because of the internet.

the internet is the ultimate democratizer, if that's the word.

democratizer.

yeah, i think that's the word.

the internet is the ultimate force that allows all of this to happen.

it's the force that allows people to really dream up all sorts of stuff.

it's what allows me to want to pursue films while also leading a big, important team and building real industrial, institutional products.

it's what allows me to have these incredibly meaningful, sometimes genuinely life-changing connections with people i would have never met in a million years otherwise.

it's what allows everyone a voice.

and as much as the internet fucking pisses me off, annoys me, destroys attention spans, pushes some people into psychosis, radicalizes other people, and occasionally helps people do genuinely horrible things, i still think the good outweighs the bad.

and then there is the world after this next transition.

not a “cleansed” world, because that isn't really what i mean.

what i mean is a post-ai world in which another huge category of barriers has disappeared.

software was one of the last major frontiers where those barriers still meaningfully existed.

and if those barriers begin disappearing too, i think the world on the other side of that would be fascinating to be part of.

i also think it could go both ways.

one version is a world of abundance.

if ai and software and information and all these technologies really do get democratized, and if there is less and less that is truly sacred or artificially scarce, maybe people get to focus more on things that are actually fulfilling.

maybe more people make art.

maybe more people pursue ideas that would previously have required access to capital, technical teams, institutions, or gatekeepers.

maybe software becomes something you make for yourself the same way you make a spreadsheet today.

maybe entire categories of work get dramatically cheaper.

maybe people have more time.

maybe there is abundance.

but even as i write that, it sounds naive.

because the other possibility is that we just descend further into this weird cyberpunk reality we are already slowly constructing.

maybe we become even more estranged from our loved ones and from everything real.

maybe the same technology that removes barriers also removes even more reasons for us to leave our rooms.

maybe we form smaller and smaller bubbles around ourselves.

maybe those bubbles become more personalized, more persuasive, more addictive, and more difficult to escape.

maybe everybody lives inside a reality generated specifically for them.

and maybe we end up with a society that would look completely alien to us today.

i don't know.

i genuinely don't know.

but for now, i think we can at least recognize that we are in the middle of a massive transition.

and maybe celebrate it a little.

because for all the horrible things the internet has done, it is still this impossible, ridiculous, magical thing that connected all of us together.

it gave us access to everything.

it broke down barriers that once looked permanent.

it made entire forms of scarcity look stupid.

and now it might be coming for software too.

because on the internet, eventually, everything gets democratized.

and nothing is sacred.