Social Soil and the Early Internet

Out of healthy social soil, wondrous things can grow.

I've been thinking a lot about that idea, proposed in a recent Noema article. When I first logged on to the internet, it was a place powered by love of knowledge and desire to contribute to something great. It didn't need anything more than that, people believed in the good they were doing contributing to an open source project, or fact checking a Wikipedia article, or making Metallica's discography available to download for free.

That version of the internet never truly went away, but most of us just sort of… stopped noticing it, as social media started taking more and more of our attention.

But then I noticed something as I was quizzing ChatGPT one day about god-knows-what. Chat had been out to the corners, and it spoke of things that I knew nothing about. It was tantalising.

More than a knot in the middle, the internet started to feel like a web of connected edges once again.

It can certainly feel rude that LLMs have consumed the entire internet, but trained and used correctly, I believe that LLMs can be used to filter out the noise and find what we're truly looking for: the thing that we're missing, not the thing that a social media algorithm decides we'll accept more of. The right people may not always get the credit, but for those who build for the love of knowledge, was that ever the goal? ◆