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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.

⚠️ Fun fact – I built one of the features of Wikipedia that maintains it even today. Hope, in service, will make you do incredible things. You will rise to the occasion, on its back. Inspiring that in others is not wrong. 15 years later.

How do you tell people, that information wasn't free. We changed the world. But not enough. We thought we were saving humanity, but we didn't. That is something I will always have to live with. We felt like angels. We were perfect. Being disabused of this was the most violent thing to ever happen.

I wish you could understand the things we felt in moment. Where, for the first time in human history, technology would provide us the conduit to save us. To save everyone. Because people would hear clarion call. But they didn't. I don't know how to tell you what it feels like to live afterwards.

what when wrong, and how to we fix it? because it's a noble goal and we really do have opportunities that just didn't exist 40 years ago. like being able to have this conversation in the first place across space and time.

Legend! I’m Gen X, and it was the same journey. I grew up in a small town with no library. The internet meant nobody would do that again! I volunteered with Project Gutenberg and scanned books. Maintained FAQs. Wrote books! We gave everyone amazing info tools and … it all turned to shit.