In general it's safe to assume that the world will default to thinking that you, I, and technology are all irrelevant. Like, people will say that it's important

In general it's safe to assume that the world will default to thinking that you, I, and technology are all irrelevant. Like, people will say that it's important in the same way that politicians say that voters are important. So when it isn't irrelevant, it's because things have snuck in to change the status quo. The internet, I think, is a big enough idea that it's still not really seen it's full impact yet - today we just see the waxing phase of the second attempt to lock down the network under the thumb of a few centralized players. (the first one being AOL et al.) but networks are really quite powerful, and I have faith that the pendulum will shift again.