Fame

We are famous. You, K and I. Truly famous. The sort of famous that qualifies for statues and mentions in edit page articles. And this is going to appeal to the lazy exoskeleton we all have -- it's simply because of the times we live in.

However, (there had to be a but ...) to enjoy the well deserved perks of fame, you, K and I, will have to wait a bit. Have you even wondered what it was like for the average joe as the world changed around him just around, let's say, 0 BC, or 1917, or 1947 or pick any other year when "the times, they were a changin.'"

Well, the world is a changin' right now. We are alive at an inflexion point in history -- one of those interesting years when something happens for the first time. When history is made. Remember when man first went into space, when he first landed on the moon. Remember the first time Adam and Eve fucked. You WANT to be there don't you.

Fantasy -- of the mental sort, not the magazine -- allows us to live other lives. It has, at different points of time, let me be Superman, Batman, Neil Armstrong, John Lennon, a blade of grass (of the non narcotic variety) and so on ad nauseum.

It has also let me be the cool average joe -- the GI landing at Dunkirk, the man with the headset at Kennedy Space Centre, the jock flying the Blackbird over Red Russia ...

And now I know there are kids who will want to be me 50 years from now.

You, K and I have logged onto the Internet after 20 tries on a VSNL connection. You, K and I have used Netscape when people still had to pay for it. You, K and I have used email addresses that no longer exist, that used text based terminals, and never recieved spam. You, K and I have seen the birth of the World Wide Web.

And you, K and I are building the Internet of the future.

Pretty cool, eh.

Kevin Kelly, the co-founder of Wired, has written about the past, the present and the future here: We Are The Web.