Uneducated Access to Unlimited Knowledge

Remember when we thought the internet would make everyone smarter? All of human knowledge would be one search away, and a new age of enlightenment would follow.

That is not quite how it turned out.

Access to information and the ability to make sense of it are two very different things, and while we managed the first one remarkably well, we mostly forgot about the second.

More signal, way more noise

When you democratize information, you democratize misinformation in the same move. For every carefully researched article there are a thousand hot takes, and for every expert there is a crowd of very confident people in the comments explaining why the expert is wrong.

Open any YouTube video on physics and scroll down, and someone will be explaining that Einstein got it wrong because "it's just common sense." Open a cooking video and there is an argument about how to hold a knife. While everyone having an opinion is fine, it breaks when everyone assumes their opinion carries the same weight as that of someone who has spent thirty years on the subject.

And "I did my own research" has quietly come to mean "I found a video that agrees with me."

The algorithm doesn't care if you're right

What worries me is less that bad takes exist and more that they now get rewarded. Bad takes have always existed, but they used to stay at the chai stall. Instead of checking whether you are right, the algorithm checks whether people reacted, and nothing gets a reaction like a confident, simple answer to a complicated question.

So the easy take rises to the top, because it is easy to watch and easier to agree with. Thirty seconds of text over a trending audio becomes "educational content," and complex topics get squeezed into Reels-sized misconceptions that travel faster than any correction could follow.

You have seen the pattern: someone reads a Wikipedia article aloud and calls it a course, a "career coach" has never had the career, and a tech reviewer has clearly never written a line of the language they are ranking. While confidence and competence online often seem to run in opposite directions, the feed cannot tell them apart.

The library with no librarian

The cruel irony is that the good material is all there too. Real experts teach real things online, often for free, and some of the best lectures in the world are a click away. I have learned an embarrassing amount from people on the internet who never charged me a rupee.

But it is like a library where anyone can add a book, nobody checks whether it is any good, and the most popular shelf is right at the entrance. The quality exists, but finding it takes a skill we never really taught.

I am not standing outside this, either. Besides posting on LinkedIn, I am writing a blog right now, sharing opinions with people I have never met. I have definitely held strong views on things I had read one article about. The megaphone is in my hand too, which is exactly why this bothers me.

So what now?

I do not want the genie back in the bottle. Open access is a good thing, and plenty of people (me included) owe a lot of what they know to it. What went wrong is that we gave everyone a publishing platform without any of the editorial habits that used to come with one.

The internet has made what I wrote last year, that schools need to teach skepticism, ten times more urgent. Information literacy, meaning who is saying this, how they would know, and what they gain if I believe them, should be taught as if it matters, because it does.

And maybe we could normalize a few uncool ideas: that some opinions are more informed than others, that not everything fits in a Reel, and that "I don't know enough to have an opinion on this" is a perfectly intelligent position.

Since all of this is just my opinion, you are welcome to tell me why I am wrong in the comments. I am sure your thirty seconds of thinking about it beats my... oh. Right. That is the whole problem, isn't it?