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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.

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.

... Yeah. If only misinformation wasn't also free, and barely ever punished. If only you could make people care about the information they have access to in the first place. If we ever get real AI, I hope to Computer Christ it wants to keep humans as peta and not... Do what we arguably deserve.

yeah we fucked it.