> I can travel anywhere in the world and find a place to stay within an hour, and do so frequently

Could you not do this before? Just book a plane ticket at the airline desk and ask for an empty room once you arrive at a hotel?

Yeah, I thought about saying that, but then I realized maybe the dude is talking about rural Tajikistan or something where there were and are no hotels, and I didn't want to be argumentative. (I imagine in rural Tajikistan random people would be delighted to offer you their hospitality, though.) I did travel around Costa Rica in 2003, and I never needed more than an hour to find a place to stay on arriving in a new town, even though internet access was scarce. So I'm not sure what the guy is talking about there.

The other things he said are mostly true. Here in Buenos Aires I've never owned a car, but that has more to do with being a huge megalopolis than anything else.

...yea. Weird. But now once you get their you can video conference call with a loved one for cheap, which in a sense takes some of the magic out of traveling as you're never really that much farther away than if you had gone to the grocery store.

You can always leave the phone at home, or simply turn it off till some emergency comes and then immediately turn it off again.

It might sound pretty awkward these days of pathetic instagram 'celebrities', but actually makes things like backpacking in the middle of nowhere much, much better experience. The magic is still out there

I don’t know, I’d say for the majority of people who aren’t so narrowly focused on conspiracy theories and political power struggles, life looks way different than it did 30 years ago.

Even in poor countries Facebook and cheap instant communication like WhatsApp have rewired the way people socialize and stay in touch.

This is mostly a response to the commenter before you, except your last sentence.

Well, I did mention people socializing via WhatsApp and Instagram. I think we just differ on what counts as “narrow” versus wide focus.

Life for ordinary Britons has changed enormously in my lifetime. In my youth it was unusual for someone to holiday abroad, now it's routine.

A budget flight to the continent and a week in an AirBnB in Europe can cost as little as a few hundred quid. Something that was only really available to the rich, or at least the very well off, is now available to almost anyone.

Ordinary Britons may not be in the 95th to 99th percentile wealth class, but they're in the 90th to 99th percentile. But I don't think that what you're talking about is a question of technology, much less of the internet — it's a matter of deregulation and political alignment, something that is coming to an end with Brexit. Aviation technology advanced in leaps and bounds from the 1890s to the 1960s and has only improved incrementally since 1970. (And of course we no longer have Concorde at any price.)

If we're talking outside the western world, things have changed far more dramatically. Across the developing world, hundreds of millions of people have risen out of abject poverty. My wife grew up in China, in a house her father built from a pile of bricks provided by his employer. She helped make their floor tiles, and this was in an industrial city. China's a different world now, and while they are the poster child, this trend isn't isolated to them. The chart linked below is astounding.

https://rwer.wordpress.com/2018/04/22/global-income-distribu...

Is this because of the internet?