> Turns out the much-maligned elitism and gatekeeping of the past were actually performing (with imperfect fairness perhaps) the quality-control function they always purported to be performing.

Do you have an example? I’m getting strong “century of the self” vibes from this post.

If you’re referring to “fake news”, you should also acknowledge that the current protests across the nation would not exist at all without social media. People who want to characterize the effects as monolithically positive or negative leave me scratching my head, and I certainly don’t want to return to getting all my news via AP.

I don't get the reference. Worry less about "vibes," I guess would be my advice. And consider that if someone says "brown cows eat grass" they're not trying to describe the entire universe; they're actually taking it as a given that your brain will work hard enough to remember that non-brown cows, and non-grass-eating cows, and even brown, non-grass-eating cows exist and have their own stories that are outside the scope of this one.

"Once upon a time, Little Red Riding Hood was going to go to..."

"NOT ALL RIDING HOODS ARE RED AND FRANKLY I OBJECT TO ANYONE WHO MONOLITHICALLY TRIES TO SAY SO AND I'M GETTING A VIBE... SEIZE HIM!"

To teach yourself programming in 1990 you would've gone to a bookstore or library, that employed a buyer/curator, who bought from a distributor, who bought from a publisher, who bought from an author, who probably also dealt with an agent and an editor. Other than the author and his/her own desire to produce something good, there were 3-5 other layers in the process, 3-5 other entities making the decision, should we submit this, should we publish this, should we distribute this, should we buy this and devote shelf space to selling it. Each of those steps is a gate through which only a limited quantity can pass, so whatever else it actually means, the book you pick up off the shelf in 1990 has passed through all those gates. Nowadays excellent and shitty writers alike are free of that.

It's hard for me to see society being able to self-critique via social media as a bad thing—newspaper headlines have certainly been exploiting the same linguistic tricks you point out for centuries. I don't see why it's bad to return the favor and build a culture that isn't represented by legacy/traditional/whatever media.

I'm not saying it's bad; there are good & bad aspects of everything. I don't even know if something can "be bad" or can "be good." Everything is both. It's the dual nature of reality. The tao symbol has light & dark, touching each other & wrapped around each other in a dance, and furthermore there's a dot of the light inside the dark and vice versa. One thing lives right in the center of its opposite. Feckin deep I know rite? A wheel carries loads and runs people over. Babies are cute and pains in the ass. Democratization of information means more democracy in information which means less aristocracy in information, I mean it's as simple as that. (And democracy and aristocracy each have good & bad aspects.)

The thing putting a negative spin on it is that at least in this author's opinion, "Most tech content is bullshit." I'm saying maybe that's because now we have access to the bottom 90% too along with the top 10% that we already had. (There was bullshit in the old days too of course, but it was usually found coming out of someone's mouth as opposed to in a book that someone bothered to spend money to print thousands of times. Although there are exceptions there too! It's death by a thousand disclaimers up in here!)