re: #57 Anymouse

I’m not sure if the Internet is a net positive or net negative for humanity.

In the plus column it has made knowledge available to anyone with a computer or cell phone connexion from anywhere in the world.

In the minus column it allows all sorts of propagandists and conspiracy theorists a much larger platform.

Search engines are not yet capable of weeding out the latter, so such information gets treated equally.

It’s made some knowledge available. But people are always asking: “Link?” for any information now, and 99.9% of what I’ve read in my life is, as they say, “hidden in books”. To comply with their request, I’d have to remember what book the info came from, which library it came from (could be one of three or four systems), find it on the online catalog, go there, find the book (assuming they still have it and it’s checked in), find the passage, make a photocopy, bring it home, scan it, make a screenshot, then…I dunno, I probably don’t have their email address, I’m not on Twitter or Fakebook…what do I do with it?

My point is, everything I know from before 2000 or so has dropped off the face of the Earth. It’s not on the internet and never will be. The internet has chopped off most of human history.