I thought everyone in the future would spend their free time reading science journals, which I discovered via Usenet (because no one in my physical environment read them). Two decades later we elected a president who has said that climate change is a Chinese hoax and wind turbines cause cancer.

I mean, no amount of reading science journals convinced us to leave Iraq and Afghanistan until after we sunk multiple trillions of dollars into it and all we got out was an anti-American, pro-Iranian government in Iraq and the Taliban de facto ruling Afghanistan...

This. At bare minimum, a better-informed population that would be increasingly resistant to gov’t and corporate propaganda.

And in a sense, that kind of came to pass. Nobody believes _anything_ the government says anymore, and skepticism is at all-time highs. It’s just… everything.

I also bet very heavily against the widespread popularity of video on the net, not due to any technical limitations, but simply because reading is so much faster.

> a better-informed population that would be increasingly resistant to gov’t and corporate propaganda.

This never came to be, because it has one gaping flaw; it assumes governments and corporations wouldn't also figure out how to use the Internet.

I don't understand the use of video to teach many things. Particularly when it's not just a "Building this together" tutorial, it's a "teaching core concepts" video. You can't go back and forth on a video without quickly skipping through it, you really have to watch the whole thing. And listening to human speech is much slower than reading. I understand it for some things (Gaming, DIY, etc) but not teaching thinking subjects.

Some people are readers and some people are listeners.

https://www.theodysseyonline.com/reader-listener