The internet promised us the Library of Alexandria, but delivered a massive slot machine.
Early internet pioneers talked about a utopian future where every human had access to the sum of all knowledge. They pictured a global library where we would all become scholars.
We got the access. The knowledge is there. But the interface to that knowledge was built by behavioral psychologists and advertising executives.
They realized that a library does not generate ad revenue. A casino does. So they turned the feed into a slot machine. Pull the lever, get a little hit of outrage, humor, or novelty. Pull it again.
The tragedy isn't that the knowledge is gone. It is that it is sitting right there, buried under an interface designed to hijack our dopamine receptors so we never actually click the link to read the dense, difficult paper.
Are we permanently stuck with the casino interface, or is there a way back to the library?