The Third Internet
About 8 years ago, I sat in a park near where I grew up and envisioned a system that plays music all day.
You could access it from the desktop, the phone, on your tv and any other device.
It knew that other people were on the network, and its main goal was to bring everyone together in real time through this soundscape.
None of that was anything new at the time, but the memorable part of the vision was writing down the phrase, “the third internet”.
I started to work on the project, but working with a coder 12 hours away in India, and a bank account that needed attention from paying work, it lost steam very quickly.
Well apparently my mind was ahead of reality that season.
And if we fast forward to today, the third internet has arrived.
I never would have imagined that the third internet is a world where creative people actually get help putting projects together.
Because for all my life, writing code was a slog.
The most fascinating thing I am learning about apps written with the help of AI, is that our first instinct is to make applications that look like the things we’re used to.
An example is the admin panel running elliott fm:
It has various tools for selecting the music that gets played on the site.
However I can also just talk to the chat agent behind the scenes, and it will do a much better job of fixing up the tracks to be shown on the site.
In the second internet, I would have to go out and find the Spotify and Apple Music links, copy and paste them back into the admin panel.
In the third internet, it goes out and finds the Spotify and Apple Music links for me.
This process is basically the way computers operated originally on the DOS and Unix command lines, yet with intelligence mixed in to run those operations.
In the second internet, I would be able to roll out the web version, and then sit around and dream about the iOS version being ready.
But in the third internet, the iOS version is available, with Android and Apple TV on the roadmap for this week.
The most important skill to cultivate right now is focus.
Be very selective about the information you read and how it affects your decisions.
Learn things for yourself by rolling up your sleeves and getting to work on skills that you previously gave up on.
AI models with high-level reasoning know more than you, but these tools will dumb themselves down to work at whatever stage or problem you are working on.
When combined with the vision and emotional context of human input, it simply becomes a calculator on steroids, helping to move your project or goal forward.
When I’m dialled into a task, I work to “drive the AI to its knees” and expose its limits. Yet we work together as collaborators.
I am not breaking it for the sake of sick pleasure like the tourists in Westworld, but to break apart every paradigm I have been taught about how things work up until now.
The alternative is to work with the second internet, where you are fed garbage news stories all day, and you read the same article over and over from different sources until you can’t take it anymore and have to go for a walk.
Enjoy the rest of your weekend 🥯 🎿
Get a good night of rest so you can wake up refreshed. Sleep helps create resilience to life’s stressors.
Going to sleep is boring but it’s a gift you give your future self.
Or you can stay up and watch Alive from 1993 like I did last night:
The Unix command line analogy is sharper than most AI takes I've read. Instead of treating conversational interfaces as something new, tying them back to CLI systems highlights how text-based interaction was always the most flexible input method. The "drive the AI to its knees" mentality is exactly right, testing limits reveals where the actual useful boundarys are, not where marketing says they should be.