Media is being deleted or locked in vaults.
Games are being shut down with no way to restore them.
The written word that has been vetted by people with domain specific knowledge is being locked behind paywalls and not being advertised, while AI machines directly lie to the curious and the seekers of knowledge.
I can throw a digital stone in any direction and hit something that is worse off thanks to the modern internet.
I would have agreed with you a few years ago. But now Google, DuckDuckGo etc. at most provide 3 pages of results, with many irrelevant or wrong. There are alternatives:
https://wiby.me/ https://clew.se/ https://kagi.com/
But that's not the majority experience and more importantly, it shows that it really can be "taken" from us.
The real problem with this is that there are vested interests at play in managing what information you see first - push something to the 2nd or 3rd page of google results and it becomes effectively invisible, especially when you have pages and pages of results that seem to push the narrative that those vested interests want you to see.
I tend to think that Huxley was right over Orwell, information is lost in the shuffle of distraction and rigged systems. The "truth" is there to find, but it's a needle in a haystack of believable lies, and those lies were crafted specifically to obfuscate that nugget of truth.
So the amount of information moving around is irrelevant if it's not useful, or it's intentionally misleading from something that might upset those who benefit from the status quo.
Information is proliferating and is more accessible, but a huge amount of that information is lies and manipulation I'm not sure that really counts as knowledge.
> The idea that I’m going to lose knowledge from a book I read 5 years ago if it disappears from my library just doesn’t track.
You might not forget what you learned from a book you read 5 years ago after it gets stolen from you, but it does mean that others are cut off from that same information. Worse is that what you saw 5 years ago might still be made avilable, but only in censored/altered forms which could easily have you questioning your memory of something you read or saw just 5 years ago.
It's not just an abstract philosophical debate that books and other forms of media are being changed, censored, or removed entirely. Or that gatekeepers want to decide what we're allowed to see and extract rent from us every time that we do. The dangers are real and understood and very much present in today's world.
I don't think that's any different to any other period of time when communication was suddenly able to expand. Gutenberg's press didn't come with an automatic lie detector that meant the printed word could only contain true facts and nothing else. Instead, it was mainly used for pamphlets and other campaigning propaganda - some of which surely had some truth to it, but much of which was partially or fully fabricated.
I think you are romanticising the past's approach to the written word here. It has always been possible to completely rewrite history, if you're willing to put the work in, and totalitarian regimes have had no issues in convincing their populations to burn their own books if necessary.
This has never been possible in the past.
Is there something materially different here with the internet? Are we now entering an era of too much free speech? Is it now too easy for us to communicate with each other? And if so, what's the cutoff? What arbitrary barrier would we need to put in place to make the internet more like the printing press and safe to use again?
Yes. There are effectively no hard copies. It is possible to change the historical record of any non-printed material to suit your particular needs like never before.
You can think of this as a world beyond Orwell's or Bradbury's wildest nightmares.
I would argue that the opposite is true: it is now harder than ever to change the historical record, which is why we now talk about hypernormality and post-truth, where even if there is evidence for something, people will still lie and claim the opposite and be believed. We live with an abundance of evidence, and yet the Orwellian ability for people in charge to tell you one thing one day, and another thing the next, has never been stronger.
And I think you're again making the mistake of thinking of the printing press as a device for printing books or other materials designed to be long-lasting and valuable. In practice, the printing press brought about a revolution of flyers and pamphlets - ephemeral documents that were distributed one day and then abandoned the next. These things should change freely, and many never entered the historical record at all.
Perhaps they'll use a warped interpretation of copyright law to do it, or maybe something even more draconian like censorship laws with a punishment for publishing banned information.
Could they do it, technically? Not unless they controlled the entire world's networks, including those of countries with competing aims. Would that stop them from trying? As we've seen with the endless attacks on end to end encryption, I'm sure they'd give it a shot.
I genuinely think our society is one of the most censorship-resistant societies in history. This comes with its own problems (how do you deal with media that genuinely is harmful, like calls to violence or plots to abuse children?) but I think this is the tradeoff that one has to make when dealing with censorship and liberty. The more you make it difficult for the authorities to shut down good speech, the more difficult it becomes to protect against harmful speech.
With online-only records any hard copies will be incidental. The source-of-truth for any record has always been online, and can be retroactively edited with much less fanfare. Incidentally, it will also be much easier to flood the world with the updated narrative.
Hell, we have Musk publicly advocating to edit old online material to suit the new, "more desirable" narrative.
Is it? I feel it's the other way around. For example, just 10 years ago, there were no apps that forbid me from taking screenshots. Copying CDs and DVDs was comparably easy, even for normal folks. How do I copy a Netflix episode again?
Also, you said "On the other hand, it is now easier than ever to make copies of materials that we see." - now you seem to be talking about finding a copy. But those are two very different things.
The result is a kind of anti-literacy. Most people can read the words, comparatively few people are media-literate enough to filter truth from lies with any reliability. So the current media landscape is unusually poisonous. It's mostly vested interests lying to you and trying to manipulate you, through ads, troll farms, and mainstream media.
The fix would be AI filtering of content. Right now there's no chance whatsoever of that working accurately, but it's possible in principle to counteract the rise of AI disinformation with AI critiques of it.
Among all of the other revolutionary changes promised by AI, that possibility has flown under the radar. But it would be a political and economic showstopper if implemented, because everyone would suddenly be seeing authoritative, accurate news and analysis - like old-school fairness doctrine journalism, but better because it could presented at a level that matched the reader, while also allowing questions.
Ironically Grok was doing something like this for a while, until it... wasn't any more.
Steam library not so much, most likely they will have to re-buy the games because even if they inherit or I just leave credentials and 2FA I can imagine someone there in business thinking "hey this account is 100 years old, we should clean that up, unless guy sends us birth certificate and proof he is still alive.".
Are you serious? To judge what's happening in the world, you need a framework. And the frameworks provided by the ubiquitous commercial and political interests are all biased in comparable ways. Abstract philosophical debate is just what the doctor ordered to get you away from the incessant assault of propaganda and brain washing.
I dunno, when Roald Dahl e-books auto-updated to censored versions with no way to rollback it did feel distinctly dystopian.
If you think beyond kids, when a certain book is ruled illegal in a certain country it will disappear from internet-connected devices overnight. Seizing physical copies from people's homes is orders of magnitude harder.
Oh wait, they didn’t.
As one example, if the Internet Archive goes offline, a massive corpus of the last two decades is gone forever. As another, I had a friend who bought hundreds of dollars of PlaysForSure music only to have the store shut down and the license revoked within the span of 12 months. Hope you didn’t care too much about those 3DS, Wii and Wii-U eshop games. (And on and on.)
We currently live in a world of abundance and access. Even with that, there are movies that can no longer be seen, music that can’t be listened to, and books that can’t be read because they were never widely or publicly available.
Thanks to Anna’s Archive and similar sources, but that doesn’t contradict the general trend toward “feudalism” (not generally having permanent unrestricted access to the source of information).
But if I’m being honest, I think this claim that if you don’t own the book you don’t have the knowledge and society will turn into digital feudalism is hyperbole. Knowledge is proliferating faster than ever, becoming more accessible than ever, and it’s easier than ever before to get the info that you’re searching for, even in this streaming world. The idea that I’m going to lose knowledge from a book I read 5 years ago if it disappears from my library just doesn’t track. In fact, it’s rare that I return to my physical books these days because I can find equivalent info faster from a quick search online.
Don’t get me wrong: I prefer having my own copies and so on. However, when people start throwing around concepts like “digital feudalism” and trying to draw parallels to the enlightenment it feels like this is all some abstract philosophical debate rather than a discussion of what’s really happening in the world.