John Hughes, Pretty In Pink and the unseen horrors of ‘net neutrality’

Pretty in pink was released on February 28, 1986. John Hughes’s film about high school and teenage angst contained one of the first cinematic hints at the technological future that was right outside our doors. In particular, Andrew McCarthy’s character (Blane) flirted with Molly Ringwald’s Andie on the library computers, resulting in Blane sending a photo of himself from his terminal to her.

In 2024 this would be seen as primitive, but in 1986 it was a look into the future. This is what it is or should be. In particular, tomorrow will be shaped by fearless investing today.

What’s important about pixelated photos slowly transferred from one computer terminal to another is that the only difference between then and now is knowledge. Thanks to the tremendous creation and acquisition of knowledge since 1986, people around the world can send words, photos, videos, books, videos and seemingly anything else around the world in seconds. This is the genius of investing.

When wealth is put to work, capital is added to those eager to invent the future, and it is on its way to enormous amounts Beautiful malfunction. Yes, you read that right. The vast majority of investments result in a proverbial dry hole, without which progress will stop. As Caltech professor Carver Mead put it, if all your experiments go as expected or expected, “you haven’t learned anything.”

Please think about this in terms of the Internet, which after about ten years boasts several million users Pretty in pink hit cinemas. Remember logging into AOL using your landline? Remember how slow connections were, how spotty they could be, and how limited internet use was? Do you remember being mysteriously asked if you “surfed the web”? What is universal today, what is always and everywhere today, was a valid question in the mid-1990s.

Please remember the past as FCC Chair Jessica Rosenworcel intends to reintroduce “net neutrality,” price controls that would equalize all communications and Internet use. With Rosenworcel’s goals in mind, imagine that the FCC usurped such extraconstitutional powers in the 1990s and, worse still, exploited them. You can’t suggest that the Internet as we know it wouldn’t exist today and that life as we know it would be completely different.

What’s important about this counterfactual is that if the Internet had never become what it has become, it’s not like we would know the difference today. Think about it. Who “demanded” the Internet, high-speed Internet or Wi-Fi in 1990, or for that matter in 1986, when Pretty in pink made it to cinemas? Few demand or long for what they cannot imagine.

This is why we should all be so grateful that regulators and politicians didn’t discover the Internet until it became “universal” in our lives. If you remember the “AOL Everywhere” commercials, you probably get the idea. Until AOL was “everywhere” in advertising and favorable media content, the previously fashionable concept of the Internet had advantages everywhere.

The problem is that Chairman Rosenworcel seems to want to stifle investment to discover the Internet of tomorrow. Why else try to restore “net neutrality”? If communication and use should be considered equal in cost, what is the point of investing in solutions that will make the Internet experience via today’s dial-up connection primitive compared to what it will be in the future?

What will Internet users lose if Rosenworcel’s extra-constitutional political desires become a commercial reality? The answer is that we don’t know, simply because we cannot claim the unknown. But just as we cannot imagine life without today’s Internet, it is terrifying to think that price controls falsely labeled “net neutrality” could deprive us of what the Internet has That’s possible. And it’s what we don’t “demand” from the Internet that should really worry us. See Pretty in pink if you are confused.