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I really wish I could describe GenZ what it felt like growing up in a miracle. My grandfather on my mother's side was a dentist. He had a grand encyclopedia collection and it was just this incredible thing. You could pick up a random book and go to a random page and just be regaled with information

There was a time where this kind of access was privileged and expensive and reserved for those with means. You would pick up encyclopedia book and understand how much this cost them. And how important it was that you had it collected by experts into a printed page. Information was not free.

Microsoft version of the encyclopedia, Encarta, was a miracle. And every year it was better and more curated and richer in multimedia and details. And I feel so sad you'll never experience what this felt like. You were living the golden age. All of humanity would have wisdom unlocked shortly.

When you lived in the year 2000, everything about humanity was solvable with technology. Hate and prejudice and war was just lack of information to the common people. We were going to solve everything. It was so easy it was so obvious.

It's meaningless to you, but even how I reflect on these moments with the encyclopedia, with Encarta, that taught me about the world that you would only ever possibly know studying the field's texts or talking with an expert. The fundamentals of building a dam. That wasn't something you could have.

It is the reason I spent so much of my teenage years on Wikipedia – as a contributor and maintainer. We were going to save humanity. We were going to make information free. And it would fix everything about us as a species. But it didn't. And that is the most crushing thing to live through.

I understand the young who think their hope has been crushed. And I sympathize. There was a world that I thought I was saving. And I didn't.

We are all the hero of our first story. Our story where everything is fixed and none are sad. But then you live your story and it turns out to be a lie. And that is when you become an adult.