In addition to being a massive extinction event, the oxygenation of the planet kicked off the evolution of multi-cellular organisms (620 million to 550 million

In addition to being a massive extinction event, the oxygenation of the planet kicked off the evolution of multi-cellular organisms (620 million to 550 million years ago), the Cambrian explosion of new species (550 million years ago), and an ice-age that triggered the end of the dinosaurs and many cold-blooded species, leading to the emergence of mammals as the apex group (66 million years ago) and eventually resulting in the appearance of Homo Sapiens with all of their social sophistication and complexity (315,000 years ago). Okay, so first of all, the oxygenation of the planet can't be held responsible for all of those things. The evolution of multi-cellular life? Sure. The Cambrian explosion? Probably. But oxygenation can't even be held responsible for the start of the dinosaurs, much less their end. The mass-extinction that set the stage for the dinosaurs was the Permian-Triassic mass extinction, which killed off 96% of ocean organisms and 70% of land organisms. The current hypothesis for the P-Tr extinction is volcanism, or perhaps the spread of anoxic water throughout the ocean. The dinosaurs, as we all know, were killed off by the asteroid that resulted in the Chixclub impact crater off the coast of the Yucatan peninsula. An alternative explanation is that they were killed off by effects of climate change from the Deccan Flats supervolcano. Neither has anything to do with the Great Oxygenation Event. This isn't nitpicking, because it demonstrates that the author of the article is essentially muddled on what they're comparing the digital transformation of our lives to. Is it like the Great Oxygenation Event, causing pain in the near term in exchange for opening up new modes of production in the future? Is it like the P-Tr mass extinction -- poorly understood phenomenon that will wipe out most businesses today, replacing them with forms of life that could not be imagined beforehand? Is it like the K-T exinction? A massive hit from an "alien" technology that wipes out old, slow-moving companies are replaces them with smaller, faster ones? Instead of treating all of these mass extinctions as separate, the author tries to treat them all as a single thing, leading back to the great oxygenation event. Similarly, they try to treat all the waves of digital technology as a single phenomenon, ignoring the fact that social networks today are substantially different from the way they were imagined when The Well was in operation. Yes, there are similarities, just as both we and dinosaurs were oxygen breathing creatures. But the difference between Facebook and BBS's are just as, if not more, relevant than their similarities. As a result of this forced analogy, the entire piece reads like a muddled mish-mash of various events in the history computing, science fiction, and Silicon Valley culture all forced to map to various events in geological history. It's tiresome, and it does more to obscure the author's point than it does to illuminate it.