An Internet Spring?

Milner is the technology guru most of us have never heard of. He was an early outside investor in Facebook,sinking $200 million in the company in 2009 for a 1.96 per cent stake. His investing savvy propelled Milner this year onto the Forbes Rich List,with an estimated net worth of $1 billion.

Milner was speaking at Yalta,at the annual mini-Davos hosted by the Ukrainian pipes baron and art collector Victor Pinchuk. What was striking about Milner’s remarks was how sharply his tone differed from that of the other participants.

The Americans—among them the economists Lawrence H Summers and Paul Krugman—were glum about their country’s economic stagnation and its political inability to adopt policies that could end it. The Europeans—a group that included the foreign ministers of Sweden and Poland—were worried about the sovereign debt crisis. Even the Turks and the Indians,whose economies grew more than 8 per cent last year,were anxious about uneven development at home,and the threat of economic tsunamis coming from abroad.

Milner’s perspective was entirely different. For one thing,at a time when where you sit so often determines where you stand,Milner almost perfectly represents a global technology elite. He mostly lives in Moscow,but has recently purchased a palatial home in Silicon Valley. He addressed the Ukrainian conference by video link from Singapore.

His theme is the technology revolution,which,in Milner’s view,is only getting started. Here are the changes he thinks are most significant:

* The Internet revolution is the fastest economic change humans have experienced,and it is accelerating. Milner said two billion people are online today. Over the next decade,he predicts that that number will more than double.

* The Internet is not just about connecting people,it is also about connecting machines,a phenomenon Milner dubbed “the Internet of things”. Milner said that five billion devices are connected today. By 2020,he thinks more than 20 billion will be.

* More information is being created than ever before. Milner asserted that as much information was created every 48 hours in 2010 as was created between the dawn of time and 2003. By 2020,that same volume of information will be generated every 60 minutes.

* People are sharing information ever more frequently. The pieces of content shared on Facebook have increased from 140 million in 2009 to 4 billion in 2011.

The result,according to Milner,is the dominance of Internet platforms relative to traditional media. “The largest newspaper in the United States is only reaching 1 per cent of the population.” he said. “That compares to Internet media,which is used by 25 per cent of the population daily and growing.”

Internet businesses are much more efficient than brick-and-mortar companies. This was the paradox of how we find ourselves simultaneously living in a time of what Milner views as unprecedented technological innovation but also high unemployment in the developed West. As an illustration,Milner cited Facebook,where,he said,each single engineer supports one million users.

Finally—and Milner admitted this was “a bit of a futuristic picture”—he predicted “the emergence of the global brain,which consists of all the humans connected to each other and to the machine and interacting in a very unique and profound way,creating an intelligence that does not belong to any single human being or computer.”

In a year that has seen the Arab Spring and the threat of the collapse of the euro,Milner’s predictions are an important reminder that the most significant revolution may be happening in cyberspace.