The Curse of 140 Characters

The reason why millions of people turn to social media has nothing to do with a technical — or worse, moral — inability to build spacecraft, but with a conscious preference.

The original (Spanish) version of this article can be found here.

There’s a well-known quote by Peter Thiel that painfully captures the frustration of our times:

“We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters.”

In just a few words, Thiel explains how, 30 or 40 years ago, society eagerly anticipated a future of lunar colonies, space travel, robots everywhere, nanotechnology, and bionic humans — a future of engineers and microchip factories. Then suddenly, without warning, everything went off course. Instead, we got a world of “distractions,” filled with people more interested in taking selfies while eating avocado toast and sipping specialty coffee than in launching new high-value industries. Damn it! It’s as if the train of history — which until the year 2000 was hurtling toward a sci-fi future at meteor speed — had taken the wrong turn and is now derailing in slow motion, threatening to stop at any moment, kick us out, and leave us stranded on the side of the road.

But that’s not what happened.

What Thiel and many others fail to understand is that 21st-century society hasn’t failed to create a technological future — it’s created a different one than they had imagined. The reason behind the success of social networks isn’t a lack of technical ability — or worse, moral decay — to build spaceships. It’s a conscious choice. The need that flying cars promised to fulfill, and the one Twitter satisfies with its 140 characters, are essentially the same. Twitter just does it better, and at lower cost.

That need is to connect with other human beings — our primary concern as a species. If giraffes have long necks to reach high leaves, and lions have strength to hunt, humans survive thanks to our unmatched ability to build and sustain hypercomplex social groups. Isolation, on the other hand, is a death sentence for us.

That’s why forming bonds with others is our main occupation — and the driving force behind nearly every innovation we’ve ever created. To connect across distances, we invented reading, writing, the printing press, the telegraph, the telephone, newspapers, television, trains, airplanes, and cars. To build more complex societies, we invented hygiene, antibiotics, sanitation, and even concrete — which makes it possible to build tall buildings. Laws, rules, governments, bureaucracy, and justice systems were all created so that we could have increasingly complex, sophisticated, and well-ordered relationships among growing groups. Human history is the story of a species learning to create ever more complex relationships.

And while it’s still too early to say definitively, we can already suspect that the rise of the Internet — which, not coincidentally, coincided with this supposed derailment of the 20th-century civilizational project — has been the second great leap in that story, surpassed only by the invention of language hundreds of thousands of years ago.

So, if someone left behind the industrial society’s version of progress, it’s because they found something better. After all, the flying car — which already exists and is called a helicopter— didn’t offer much beyond the benefits of a regular car. And it’s hard to see what could be done on a hypothetical vacation to the moon. Certainly nothing worth spending a lifetime chained to a desk. The 20th-century dream didn’t die by assassination; it died of boredom.

By contrast, the possibility of opening your computer and instantly becoming the protagonist of a global “rear window” is a civilizational dream never before experienced — a bottomless sea that promises to satisfy our endless curiosity and opens up infinite possibilities for connection. No supersonic flight could compete with that kind of value proposition.

That’s why we’re obsessed with the Internet. The amount of information we pour into it has multiplied by trillions — and still doubles every two years — in a dizzying progression that reflects just how much interest and desire it continues to capture, whether for learning, connecting, or creating without limits.

This very opportunity to become a writer here on Substack, a privilege that just a few decades ago was only available to a handful of men, is a perfect example. The same goes for having your own TV show on YouTube, or exchanging ideas with a community that couldn’t even have existed without the web. The Internet has given rise to an entirely new form of existence, something no faster plane could have ever achieved.

So no one “gave” us 140 characters like a scam — we chose them. We chose this path of progress over flying cars and robots because it made us happier, more connected, and more effective.

What’s incredible is how little attention we pay to this phenomenon. We constantly frame it as mere distraction — a detour from the “true” path of humanity — like in the cliché of young people taking selfies. The most transformative event in our lifetimes is still overshadowed by the grumbling of 20th-century nostalgics raised on superhero comics. But also by something darker: it’s economically inconvenient.

Literally: the more the knowledge-based digital society grows, the more the traditional economy shrinks. What sets the Digital Revolution apart from the futuristic dreams of the 20th century is that it doesn’t require the kind of investment that the Industrial Revolution did, and it doesn’t produce the same kinds of jobs either. Industrial transformations required massive capital to build factories, railroads, power plants, mines, and shipyards. These monumental projects shaped both physical and social landscapes. Wherever a factory rose, a working-class neighborhood would form around it, along with schools, hospitals, bars, and local newspapers. Wealth was measured in steel, coal, kilometers of track, or tons produced. Almost all of today’s rich got that way through this process. The creation of the middle class in the West is inseparable from that era of material development.

But the Digital Revolution doesn’t build factories or move tons — it moves bits. Its raw material is knowledge. Its basic infrastructure is the network. Its energy is attention. When we gave up transforming the physical world to create new ones, we opened the door to a desert of job opportunities for millions, with stagnant wages and precarious conditions that the old steel magnates could never have imagined and still don’t understand.

So, the one that's truly off course — the one on a train about to derail — isn’t society. It’s the economy. And with it, the organization of nations that bet everything on markets and full employment to ensure a place in the world for everyone and enough revenue to fund public services. This, and not the absence of Thiel’s flying cars, is what’s creating the civilizational mess we’re trapped in.

The paradox is brutal: we’ve built the most connected, creative, and intelligent civilization in history — without an economic model that can support it for all.

That’s why the task ahead isn’t to get back on the track of flying cars. Trying to revive the industrial model of the 20th century doesn’t just make no sense: it would be undesirable.

Instead, we could start thinking about how to make this society — one where so many things, like energy, information, and even food, are becoming abundant — a much better place.