I remember that hope for a future where all knowledge would be available at the click of a button, where the internet would be used to enlighten and enrich ordinary people. The internet of today is truly tragic in contrast.

A future where all human knowledge is at one’s fingertips is still a possibility. The problem is that our society is based on the profit motive. This means corporations will subsume everything they can squeeze profits out of.

All human knowledge _is_ at one's fingertips. Virtually all books are available through gutenberg or libgen. The vast majority of academic research through sci-hub. The truth is that people are simply not interested.

And some people are simply overwhelmed. In many ways, it was easier to follow cultural development when it was more limited in scope and availability: "this month you'll read this book, listen to this album, watch this movie, and that's it." If you wanted more, you had to work for it, or even travel.

Now there are millions of choices to be made every single day, all at one's fingertips, and it's just so much. Should I read this or that? Which of the gazillion movies and series, on umpteen streaming services, do I want to watch? Etc etc. In comparison, tv-zapping was cognitively trivial: just cycle through channels until you get bored, no need to reason about your wishes and inclinations.

Reflecting on the past I think there was something of a benefit to the limitations imposed by scarcity - in childhood the limitations on what books, games, toys and tv I could find forced me to explore topics and genres I would ignore today, and in my young adulthood there was still something magical about traveling specifically to go hunting for <collectible>.

There were definitely some advanced dynamics that are now very hard to replicate. Some of the businesses that have been wiped out (the record store, the book store, the blockbuster joint...) often acted as cultural nexus in very distinctive ways that websites don't really replicate.

Yeah - going to the bookstore or comic shop used to be something really special. Maybe I'll find something new, maybe I won't, but it's and adventure. I remember traveling across the city to that one comic shop that would have that one obscure comic I needed.

Today.. Well I don't even have to leave my desk. On one hand, I get what I want that much easier. It's still a sort of magic, but it's not the same.

Yeah - I think things are generally a lot better than they were when it comes to a precocious kid's ability to access interesting information.

The issue now isn't scarcity so much as abundance, avoiding apps designed to be addicting and distracting, and being able to sort through the massive amount of information to find the high value stuff that's really great.

If you're a kid growing up without parents to help pull stuff out of the 'unknown unknowns' then it's hard to dig through things to find the good stuff.

I supposed I'm a little more optimistic - I think a lot of kids are interested, it's just a firehose (and there's a lot of easily accessible junk food designed by highly paid devs to make it as 'engaging' as possible).

all knowledge includes quality and crap. The average citizen doesn't have the tools or training to discern the two.

The average citizen shouldn't need college level statistics and logical fallacy training to lead a comparably normal/healthy life.

But maybe there is an argument to be made to completely revamp k-12 with the sole goal of training people to be able to discern good and bad information.

Its not easy, plenty of professorial researchers fall for some of the same traps.

> Virtually all books are available through gutenberg or libgen

I'm confused by the word "virtually" here.

Does Project Gutenberg + libgen house everything that can be accessed through university subscriptions (Elsevier, etc.) and Google books/scholar?

A lot of knowledge isn't contained in books. For one thing, companies have no incentive to publish their so called trade secrets. For another, books are often conceived as supplementary reference material for people who are verbally taught "information." The books are not intended to function on their own.

I mostly agree with you, but it's not all bad. Wikipedia, for all its flaws, is a tremendous repository of knowledge, so are its sister projects. Project Gutenberg stores vast amounts of literature. archive.org preserves literature, video, software, audio data. Librivox offers audio book recordings of public domain literature. And last but not least, free/open source software puts mountains of software for nearly every purpose I could imagine at one's fingertips.

All of these are free for anyone to access and contribute.

Many of these projects got started in the late 1990s or early 2000s, with the 1996 'Declaration' as a key rallying point.

The social-media dominated Internet of today is the polar opposite; it's very explicitly trying to make cyberspace as thin a layer as possible onto ordinary meatspace, because this is how large social media firms can maximize short-term "growth", "engagement" and advertising profits. This could even be acceptable on its own terms, but these large social media sites tend to be sources of spillover that affects even the formerly more independent Internet, and reduces its effectiveness quite a lot compared to what it could be.

> The internet of today is truly tragic in contrast.

It's not all black and white, though. The amount of knowledge available at, say, youtube, is still absolutely mind-bogglingly vast. Imagine learning to flint knap in the 90s, good luck if you can't get access to one of the very few experimental archaeologists who are able to teach this; now there are entire courses on youtube, free for all.

And all those tools and knowledge on how to collaborate on very short cycle times in a massively distributed fashion, I'm absolutely certain that helped a lot tackling Covid-19 (like, with vaccine development and production, treatment research, logistics, etc.)

YouTube is a centralized service that's likely not even economically sustainable in the long term, given the sheer amount of random video junk that gets uploaded on there every minute. I'll take this argument more seriously when a comparable service can be built on 100% commodity tech (probably using some variety of IPFS for cdn-like distributed sourcing) and be made economically sustainable for creators as well (the various crowdfunding platforms are showing that something like this can work).

Now you're moving goalposts. There's a tremendous amount of knowledge of pretty much arbitrary depth on Youtube, and most is pretty well findable using their search, and Youtube is by far not the only knowledge repository out there, and many are more or less "non-proprietary", whatever exactly you mean by that.

But Youtube in particular is a service open to everyone with the barrier of entry being access to an old-ish smartphone. In very large parts of the world, that's almost everyone by now, though not everyone will get 4k quality. I can look up how to fix my bike, how to make Austrian Backhendl from scratch, to what neutron stars are made of and how exactly the physics work, even lectures by great minds in the field, and all of this has grown pretty much organically. As someone who has had to rely on local libraries exclusively because it was the 90s and there was no internet to speak of, I think that's absolutely amazing. Wikipedia is amazing, archive.org is amazing, all the millions of niche encyclopedias are amazing, PubMed and arXiv are amazing, and Google and friends are amazing and profoundly revolutionary, even with all their problems.

But you also require this to be non-proprietary, and to run on commodity tech and even more economically sustainable than Youtube, and free of low-quality content – even books can't offer that. Printing at scale is not commodity tech at all, publishing houses are extremely proprietary in every way, gatekeep to the extreme, still publish a lot of junk, pretty much anything niche is fighting to remain afloat, cheap modern paperback paper doesn't last like vellum did, and while there are public libraries in most places, these aren't sustainable on their own, they're funded by the public.

Still, books have been central to an intellectual and cultural revolution without equal, and I wouldn't discount them just on their not-libre-enough-ness. Same goes for the present-day internet – yes, there's an awful lot of junk, dark patterns, centralization, what-have-you – but internet for the masses is merely two decades old, and most people haven't even grasped its fundamentals yet, and if you don't see past the problems, you miss the fire-and-printing-press revolutionary technology and cultural leap part, and that would be a shame.

What's wrong with PeerTube (aside from it being niche, but that's not really a problem per se, more an opportunity)? Is it difficult to deploy (again, an opportunity to create an easier deployment experience)?

I think economic sustainability of content creation is orthogonal to the hosting problem. Crowdfunding, like you say, could work, independently of the platform. I see lots of YouTube channels I follow use Patreon, for example.

If it was merely corporate "profit motive" then we wouldn't see all the attempts at censorship and control of the internet by governments around the world, including even ones we might think of as "freedom" loving.

Stupid sci-fi analogy incoming: it's almost like the chaos and the warp from 40k. This potential that just became corrupted and amplified by the emotions of beings.

The declaration is noble but it feels too much like an almost mythical unifying spirit that pushes humanity to some perceived enlightened perfection. To be fair the previous enlightenment suffered that same problem. Individuals will pursue matters that satisfy both the real and perceived needs. The desire to push humanity towards more noble intentions is good but needs to factor the human level.

That future is already here, and the Internet today has knowledge that would have been inaccessible by anyone before regardless of his position or power. No university, library or institution did have that much knowledge in the known civilizations.

The reality is that 99.99% of the people are interested in posting selfies or short videos to some data-harvesting app and do not mind the intrusion for their privacy. Humans in the Internet are like monkeys living in a first-world developed city.

> the internet would be used to enlighten and enrich ordinary people. The internet of today is truly tragic in contrast.

Are you sure? There's certainly lots of "tragic" stuff in the internet today. But I don't think that, even in their wildest dreams, the first users of the internet who hoped for a fantastic future could fathom the current enormity of sci-hub, library genesis and wikipedia.

I challenge you to come up with any knowledge I can't click my way through to.

That's actually super easy : obscure data sheets for embedded devices, private R&D that companies everywhere hoard, pre-internet content that nobody cares enough about to digitize, any content that rotted or was taken down by the original hosters before being mirrored, things that (dominant) search engines don't archive, things that was left behind by the SEO arms race in a priorty bucket so low it might as well not exist for any reasonable amount of effort, and etc... . Things get even worse if you consider legal questions e.g. the SciHub saga or the YouTube copyrights fiasco

I'm sure there is more if one thinks carefully enough, the internet is wonderful memory, but it's _memory_, it _will_ fail you at some point or another. Distribution merely decreases the probability of faliure, but any arbitarily small probability can be made arbitarily large by multiplying by enough population size.

Yesterday I was in the village of Broadwell, just outside Stow on the Wold, UK.

I sat on a bench which had a plaque on it. It was a memorial to Malcolm Jeffries who died on his birthday in 1974 aged 20 years. His birth day and month was not mentioned.

I felt like this was an event, something notable and I wanted to know more about it. I searched the web but so far I haven't found anything.

I'm not really challenging you, I guess I'm just saying that a lot of "knowledge" hasn't made it to the web and likely never will.

A slight aside, but are you aware of openbenches.org ?

It is a user generated database of memorial benches. It doesn't seem to include the bench you're after. If you happened to take a photo of the inscription you could add it yourself.

I'll do that, thanks.

Instead, venture capital backed firms devised systems of corporate surveillance and propaganda delivery that would've made the Stasi proud.

What a pity.

Still, at least Sci-Hub and Libgen exist.

A lot of censorship is mandated by governments. Here in the EU companies have to pay huge fines if they don't comply with censoring laws.

The problem might not be venture capital, but simply there being entities (companies) that the government can get to.

Individuals fare even worse. Try to host content that your government does not approve off.

A transcript for Eben Moglen's talk is available at http://moglen.law.columbia.edu/publications/berlin-keynote.h...

The flaw in this vision was the naive assumption that all or at least most of this information would be honest and correct. It’s the usual failure of mostly honest people to factor in just how many sociopaths there are and to imagine what those with no ethics (or “end justifies the means” ethics) will do.

Instead we have entered a “fog of war” situation where it’s almost impossible to figure out what’s happening. Add to that the new practices of online cult indoctrination (“pilling”) and you now have tons of bad faith sophistry on top of all that bad faith propaganda. Online popular intellectuals now “hide their power level” in a gamified quest to indoctrinate people.

I’ve been predicting for a while that at some point civilization will be forced to make lying illegal. To knowingly state a falsehood that is not clearly labeled as fiction or satire would be a felony subject to large fines and loss of access to certain media for corporations and/or prison sentences for people.

The reason this has never been done is the thorny problem of determining truth, but at some point we might be forced to either go there or shut off the net. There will be a ton of collateral damage and chilling effects, but I wonder if the choice is between this and death by suffocation in bullshit.