The Blue Link and the Backseat

When Marc Andreessen was asked why hyperlinks were blue, his answer was disarmingly simple: he liked the color blue. That was it. No committee, no grand design study, no academic consensus. Just one man’s preference, stamped onto the architecture of the internet forever. And now billions of people live inside a world colored by his impulse.

This story is trivial on the surface and profound underneath. It reveals the hidden scaffolding of culture: it is not built by invisible laws or forces of nature. It is built by people—individuals—who dared to assert that their preference, their taste, their decision should become reality. The world is littered with the fingerprints of those who refused to wait for permission.

But most people, confronted with this reality, recoil. To admit that society is shaped by the strongest personalities is to admit that you, too, could shape it if only you stepped forward. That truth is too heavy for most to bear. It’s easier to believe in inevitability—systems, institutions, “the way things are.” It’s easier to resign yourself to the backseat and call it humility or realism.

Modern culture thrives on this sense of helplessness. It whispers that you are a mere consumer, not a creator. That the rails are already laid, that the best you can do is ride along and maybe choose your seat. But this is a lie. Every building, every law, every tradition, every pixel on your screen was once arbitrary. Once, someone said: I like blue better than green. And the world bent around that choice.

You are allowed to do the same.

The battleground of ideas is not fair, and it has never been. The loudest, most consistent, most relentless voices set the tone of their era. That has always been the case, and it always will be. The question is not whether this is fair. The question is whether you will accept the weight of your own preferences as worthy of shaping reality—or whether you will surrender them, pretending they don’t matter, while others build the world in their image.

Most people resign themselves to the backseat of life. But the front seat is empty, waiting for anyone willing to grab the wheel and say, I like blue.