Business · Fortune Technology
The internet isn’t just like real life, a top VC confirms—it is real life
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The phrase “touch grass” has become the internet’s way of telling someone to log off and rejoin the real world.
Key facts
- As Tabarrok has separately noted, real British wages were flat from 1780 to 1840 while output per worker doubled; life expectancy in 1840s Manchester was up to age 26
- The Jacquard loom, introduced in France around 1805, used a chain of punched cards to control weaving patterns, a design that Charles Babbage borrowed directly for his Analytical Engine
- The gains finally broadened after 1840, and not through the market, but through the Factory Acts, unions, and the hard construction of countervailing political power — It is a thesis that finds an unlikely illustration in a separate essay published the same week by George Mason economist Alex Tabarrok
Summary
In a new essay published through a16z, Torenberg makes a sweeping argument: The internet isn’t encroaching on real life. “The internet is real life,” Torenberg writes. The evidence Torenberg marshals ranges across culture, politics, language, and media. The deeper claim is philosophical. Torenberg argues there is no such thing as unmediated human existence—and there never was.