In the last season of Halt and Catch Fire, there’s a scene set in the early days of the internet. New websites are being added and there’s no search engine yet. While developing a search engine, the characters manually curate a directory of websites one by one. One of them says something like, “When there are 500 or even 5,000 sites, what you’re saying works fine. But what will you do when there are 5 million?”

From where we stand now, that seems absurd; manually curating websites one by one. But back then, it wasn’t absurd at all.

I think the same applies to today’s centralized internet systems. The internet cannot truly evolve on top of centralized structures. It just can’t. From where we are now, it looks reasonable and *functional* but in the future, we’ll realize how absurd and unsustainable it is. Just as manually managing websites once seemed practical but now feels ridiculous, trying to run the internet through non-decentralized systems will one day seem just as absurd.