If you need a fun fact for a corporate icebreaker activity, you can always say, “I was Time magazine’s Person of the Year in 2006,” then stand around awkwardly waiting for someone to Google it.

The official announcement of “your” accomplishment makes for good reading in 2025. In tech circles, we often regard the early days of Web 2.0 as a time of naivety when we thought that letting anyone post on the internet would democratize media and unlock an era of creative expression. Of course, we know now that it isn’t so simple—that open platforms can amplify extreme views, for example, or serve as vectors for misinformation. But apparently we also knew this then, in the earliest days of YouTube and Facebook:

Web 2.0 harnesses the stupidity of crowds as well as its wisdom. Some of the comments on YouTube make you weep for the future of humanity just for the spelling alone, never mind the obscenity and the naked hatred.

But that’s what makes all this interesting. Web 2.0 is a massive social experiment, and like any experiment worth trying, it could fail.

Obviously, the course we chose twenty years ago led us to the world of today. But we didn’t select this path arbitrarily, or without regard for the challenges it would present; we examined the risks and decided the experiment was worth it.

I got a similar sense from reading Thomas Friedman’s The World is Flat (2005), which lays out a theory of globalization based on the convergence of technological development (the internet) and trade liberalization. Some of the passages feel quaint:

If there is a skilled person in Timbuktu, he will get work if he knows how to access the rest of the world, which is quite easy today. You can make a Web site and have an e-mail address and you are up and running. (Ch. 3)

(In the ebook, I commented, “Taxes? Immigration law?”) But elsewhere, Friedman anticipates critiques of globalization which have now become standard:

In the flat world, the balance of power between global companies and the individual communities in which they operate is tilting more and more in favor of the companies, many of them American-based. These companies command as much if not more power than many governments. (Ch. 13)

Not to mention “What the world has never witnessed is an old-style pandemic in a Wal-Mart world,” later on in the same chapter.