The Burning of the Information Superlibrary

Taking aim at one line.

>Internet rolled out with a promise: that all the information of the world will be reachable to everyone connected. The greatest library anyone has ever built, and accessible to anyone.

Promises are easy to make but much harder to fulfill. The early internet was not inoculated against the virus of reality. It was biased to the wealthy who could afford computers and access. Wealth was biased to those that had education. And at the time those traits were not strongly biased to people who were biased to getting as much as they can for themselves.

This was never going to last. And anyone that did was simply hopecasting the future without a realistic look on how large scale systems actually work. While the internet wasn't a singular monoculture at first, it was like a mosaic of monocultures. Once all of reality moved it the truth was revealed. That "Everything everywhere all at once" does not make a good tasting meal, once everyone was on suddenly trolls had huge amounts of power. Then spammers invaded in mass from a million different sources. As worldwide access boomed you were then presented with a massive wealth disparity between users. Many users making a $1 a week had nothing to offer the large countries in general, but in turn they could make a great living by turning to crimes an scams. Add in cell phones and app monopolies starting in the 2010+ era and a few large companies quickly monopolized the general open net started to become a wasteland filled with bots and scams. Then Gen AI was a final, but inevitable, killing blow, the tragedy of the commons realized.

This is not a problem that can really be solved without introducing hundreds of other complex issues across national lines. You could cut your internet off from the rest of the world at national lines, but there would still be at least some gaps scammers would get in on. And being cut off just sets your country up from the inside to be taken over by authoritarians.

Sad.