We all have these pivots of awareness that shift our perspective about what is real and what is important and what is worth doing. We can’t intellectualize them beforehand because they require first-hand exposure through experience. They expand agency by redefining possibility.
Instead of leading us to truth, the Internet gave everyone the unparalleled opportunity to build their own personal knowledge universe, catalyzing a comprehensive unmooring of society from actual fact that has surely been a factor in the rise of Trump and a global turn towards propaganda-fed authoritarianism.
Instead of gaining access to the library of all human knowledge, we ended up card-carrying members of Jorge Luis Borges’ “Library of Babel” — that infinite biblio-nightmare that stockpiled every possible iteration of gibberish along with the real books written in real languages.