A (non-Exhaustive) List of Things You Can Do With the Internet

We all take the Internet for granted today, so as a brainstorming exercise I thought I might try to think up a list of things that you can do with the Internet. This is obviously not an exhaustive list, and it’s surely not a list of everything the Internet will ever be able to let you do–I just thought I’d try to contextualize this point in history by pointing out how easy the Internet has made our lives.

On reading it, some food for thought: how much of this is new? How much of it is made easier? How much of it is worth doing?

• Pay your bills.
• Download a music album, video game or movie, legally or illegally.
• Learn the history of the life of Nikola Tesla.
• Download a free operating system.
• Collaborate on a calendar.
• Find out what your friends are doing.
• Collaborate on a massive trolling effort.
• Find out how much money is in your bank account, your IRA, or any stock market holdings.
• Choose from numerous comics to read, without buying a newspaper.
• Find out what a word means in any language with a web presence.
• Talk to a friend in real time on the other side of the world, for free.
• Find out how to get past a tricky part in a video game.
• Find a job, or network with potential colleagues.
• Find out what’s happening in real time in Congress, and read commentary from any political perspective in existence.
• Offer your own commentary, and maybe even convince someone you’re right.
• Learn how to make a web site or program of your own, using any existing methodology.
• Buy basically anything that can be legally shipped to you–and a lot of stuff that can’t.
• Reunite with someone you’ve completely lost contact with.
• Find porn of anything. (I’m not kidding, and you know it.)
• Aggregate all the most recent news about everything you care about into a single window.
• Learn how to program in any programming language.
• Learn about any topic in music theory.
• Have an affair. Discreetly.
• Read the entire text of a public domain book, or have it read to you.
• Acquire, modify, patch and redistribute the original source code of numerous high-quality pieces of software.
• Collaborate with many other developers who share your interests and intentions in doing so.
• Remotely and securely control a machine nowhere near you.
• Download a screensaver that constantly evolves based on user preferences.
• Participate in a revolt against an authority figure.
• Provide your own opinions, and maybe even make money doing it.
• Develop a new way to make money that no one in the world has ever done before.
• Get into an incredibly vitriolic argument, and enjoy every minute of it.
• Sell anything.
• Let whoever made a piece of software you’re using know if something is wrong with it.
• Watch TV shows from another country long before they’re ever officially brought to where you are, complete with subtitles.
• Teach the world how to do something.

Anything else interesting you can think of that I missed?