Flying cars were the iconic vision of our future for science fiction fans for at least half of the 20th century. At the close of that century, The Fifth Element provided a setting that perfectly encapsulated this aspirational vision, showing a city filled with orderly rows of traffic in the air, staggered vertically. The fact that we have not fulfilled this vision is often touted as an example of a larger failure to fulfill the promise of continuous, large-scale, high-tech innovations. The Internet, on the other hand, was for the most part not foreshadowed in 20th century science fiction. Against a narrative of growing popularity, I will argue that the Internet is in fact a much greater good for human beings than flying cars would have been — or will be, if they do finally arrive.

Founders Fund, the famous VC of which Peter Thiel is a part, has fueled this narrative with the widely circulated motto “we wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters.” This is intentionally facetious of course — not only does it downplay the impact of Twitter, but it pretends that Twitter is all the Internet has brought us. And this from the man who made his first millions by co-founding PayPal.

Any attempt to compare something like the Internet to something like flying cars begs the question of what your standards are. What are the notions of the good, or goods, that provide the scale on which each item is weighed? For most economists, the scale is ordinal utility along the Pareto model, and the question is typically the amount of consumer surplus produced by one or the other, or the relative gains of each. The consumer surplus of the Internet is a hotly debated topic, and I do not intend to add to it. Moreover, ordinal utility is not a scale of values I’m willing to endorse. It is a useful framework, but its implied ethics are problematic at best.

Instead I prefer frameworks like the one provided in Daniel C. Russell’s Happiness for Humans. Russell surveys the ancient debates on living well, as well as the modern psychological literature, and concludes:

[T]he person with the best chance for a happy life is the one who can cope with change, finds people to love, and then loves them as if his happiness, his very identity, depended on them. On my view, doing all of that wisely is just what happiness is.

The people in your life are your greatest source of happiness or of misery. Finding the right people, as well as relating to them in the right ways, requires wisdom. Wisdom can only be gained from experience and from other people, who, as Protagoras once said, are both our fellow students and fellow tutors in understanding the good.

In this context, the ability to instantly communicate with anyone anywhere on the planet has some very interesting potential. It is much easier to encounter many more potential tutors and students than ever before — for however briefly, for however transient a connection. We may also trade stories, the very lifeblood of our concrete thoughts and our moral compasses. We may learn of possibilities that we had never thought of — everything from a novel recipe to the very idea that we could begin to learn how to cook; from genres of music we had never known about to the idea that we might compose and record some music of our own. And audiences that were inaccessible to nearly anyone except for a very high fixed cost prior to the net. An audience of five, twenty, a hundred, or five hundred is paltry compared to what is required to make a living by doing a particular craft. But it is many more people than the typical passion project was capable of marshaling before the Internet, and these are not mere consumers or audiences — they are critics and fans and, often, new friends. As Jerry Holkins of the webcomic Penny Arcade has put it, the most revolutionary change has not been between creators and publishers, but between creators and their audience.

So with respect to Peter Thiel, I would like to amend the Founder’s Fund motto somewhat:

We wanted flying cars, instead we got the ability to instantly connect with anyone anywhere in the world, to share stories, pictures, music, podcasts, ideas, film, animation, comics, feedback, friendship, love, and our lives. Flying cars seem really cool on their face, but I somehow doubt that they would have so meaningful an impact on our lives.