The modern, mass-accessible internet is ~10 years old. Maybe a little older, maybe a little less. A huge amount of the drive has been to onboard everyone, to get new users, at any cost. Via design that makes sure everything is easy & accessible. Even more so, new incipient media & hypermedia has emerged to capture eyeballs. It's been a race to the bottom for the attention economy. On the one hand we do have a broad competition to fascinate people, to show them interesting things, and huge troves of videos to engage in, but my feeling remains that we've created a fairly superficial net in which to capture attention.

This will not hold forever. At some point, society & humanity will start to emerge some desire, some sense, to escape the baser levels, & to find more sophisticated, positively reinforcing forces will emerge. Particularly with so many abusers & manipulators & bad actors, the desire to have better considered information, of a higher refinement, is something that I look forward to people seeking.

On another level: I do fret that globalization has destroyed the need for polymaths, for the well considered competent doers of the world. I fret that specialization & concentrated industry shield humankind from itself, that we have hidden much of the world about us behind a shroud. Computers, sadly, are one of the worst offenders here, although I think changing that is one of the most possible & most useful ways to re-instill a locus of control, to put people back in touch with the mechanisms of the world.

Little of this bears close resemblence to the discussion on IQ, but to me, IQ follows behind the questions of what society engages in, what it's focus is. I believe the older industrializing world had a physicality & reality to it, an emerging-ness, that emphasized the importance of intelligence, reasoning and science: the push for Enlightenment was still real to that older world, and that drove the pursuit of intellect.