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