In rural Australia in the 1940s, my mother had rocks thrown at her and was branded a 'communist' because her father, a school headmaster, advocated for establishing a public library.
In the Canadian province where I now reside, the Catholic Church controlled libraries -- and thus access to information -- until the 1960s.
We forget how recent the democratisation of knowledge is -- how transformative such institutions were and how hard-won.
We should not part with them easily.
People worry a lot about losing knowledge — about "burned-down libraries".
Comparatively few people seem to worry about what happens if you take a billion books full of auto-generated, often-untrue junk text and *add* them all to the library.
In theory, nothing is lost. In reality, everything is lost, because nothing useful can now be found.
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