The absurdity of access to information in 2026 America
On the one hand, there’s Wikipedia.
On the other, there is speedy, but often sloppy or wrong AI.
On the one hand, the wealthy can subscribe to expensive but highly vetted, carefully curated new and factual white papers on key subjects like - emerging competitors in semiconductors, the impact of climate change on agriculture, demographic shifts affecting real estate demand, etc.
For a brief time, old newspapers were readily available in many free archives. It was glorious to be able to read articles dating back to 1880s or 1920s about what was happening in the lives of my parents or grandparents. Sometimes small details, and sometimes big events, like the downing of a ship in Lake Michigan that took the life of a great great uncle, who was the sailor brother of a great great grandfather.
Newspapers try to make money now by putting current events behind paywalls, but also even history, behind paywalls. I don’t blame them, but it is annoying because the amount of data that needs to be stored is minimal. The value to the broader public is satisfying curiosity, facilitating research, doing family history, expanding their minds about what life was like. And the other value is to be able to confirm facts that they read in newspapers by cross checking elsewhere on the Internet.
But now thanks to all the AI slop and the payrolls there’s for less that can be trusted, and it is buried under mountains of nonsense.
Meanwhile, data about the ads that I click on, my key strokes, how long I spent on individual webpages or probably messages I sent, websites I visited? Apparently that massive data on all of us can be economically stored by billionaires and their minions for the use of billionaires and their minions to make bigger profits or manipulate us.
Our government facilitated the Internet. We all pay for access to it, pretty large amounts.
Of all the things they try to take away from the common man — dignity, privacy, powers of concentration, unfiltered, communication, and the joy that was the Internet, a frontier to explore in the 90s — the promise of a better democracy and the distortion of our own shared history is particularly galling.
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