Wikipedia functionally ended the market for encyclopedias. When I was a kid I would go to the library and read an encyclopedia just to see what random knowledge was in there. Traveling salesman would sell encyclopedias door to door and they were hugely expensive. Then Encarta came along and it was mind blowing you could have all that information on some CDs. Then Wikipedia killed all of them and did it for free.

When computers began to take hold in middle class homes, one of the biggest gold rushes was to be the encyclopedia of choice on the computer, since consumers saw encyclopedia software as an obvious (and maybe best!) use case for a computer.

These people sound like exact copies of the people saying voting in 2000 didn’t matter, and that turned out to be the most politically consequential of my lifetime. Gore was imperfect as they all are, but holy fuck did Dubya fuck up literally everything he touched.

Among many, many, many things, Dubya started forever wars killing untold hundreds of thousands of people. He accelerated oil and gas production, absolutely setting the Climate Change world on a pace for disaster. He seated Alito, unquestionably the biggest monster currently on the Supreme Court. And he passed a monster tax cut for the rich that set us on this path of unrestrained deficit spending.

And that’s just the headlines. Remember when he tried to put his personal lawyer on the Supreme Court? lol

Gen X already tried this 25 years ago and it fucked the world up so badly that we need to be saved by the future generations. Imagine not learning that lesson and doing it again.