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.