This is a very well written essay, but I find it rather Valley-centric. There are other worlds out there, non-internet worlds. There are people in west Texas and North Dakota working on oil and gas drilling rigs. There are painters and carpenters, dentists and nurses and oncologists. There are Marines and Navy pilots and infantrymen and -women. Many of these professions are largely the same as they were prior to the advent of the 1970s microcomputer revolution.

Of course, there are plenty of professions that are in trouble if not ceased to exist. Shoe stores, book stores, and clothing stores are all in big trouble these days, as are small hardware stores and small grocery stores and non-chain coffee shops.

Someone who's feeling the level of angst and confusion and directionless of this author should probably consider changing fields, or maybe disconnect more often and wander barefoot in a garden (watch out for deer ticks and yellow jacket wasps, though; nature is not necessarily all fun and games).

The internet is a tool, a means to an end. It's been a way for many of us to reconnect with long lost classmates, stay in touch with distant loved ones like never before. It's enabled severely handicapped people to have jobs and lead more productive lives. It's a miracle, really.

When I was a college student spending a couple of years abroad in Asia in 1980, there was no email, no Skype, and no cell phones. I'd write long letters to the family on international airmail paper, fold it and put an airmail stamp on it, and drop it in the mailbox. A couple of weeks later, it would get to my family in the U.S. If I wanted to make an international call, it was a big and expensive project. I took hundreds of photographs and they had to be developed, and copies made, and physically mailed out to people.

Now, kids doing a junior year abroad are light seconds away from their loved ones. They can text their significant other 50 times a day, send them selfies, post a running travelogue on Facebook or Pinterest, and virtually speaking they are right next door. It's an incredible shift. Take a video of where they are and post it to Youtube the same day. Unbelievable, to those of us who grew up before this was all taken for granted.

And, probably there will be equally vast technological shifts in the future that will have the current 20-something generation, who are so tech-savvy, saying in 25 years -- Wow, we used to have this thing called "email" and we had to use Google to discover interesting facts! We had to carry around these devices called tablets in order to access the world's knowledge -- and even then, we couldn't access all of it all the time! We needed these little devices called cell phones in order to communicate. Etc. Huge paradigm shifts await us.

Perhaps they will not be so benign, e.g. vast AI entities that wrest control of our world away from us. Perhaps we'll be slaves of a future superior race of cyborgs, or wiped out as an inferior competitor.

The future is exciting, and challenging, and even though one can point to the dark corners and seediness of things at any given point, in the long run it's an amazing ride, an endless roller coaster. We have amazing power today to shape our future, if only we can understand and direct this power without destroying ourselves.

Just my 2 cents' ;-)