This is your reminder that you can download a compressed version of the Wikipedia at a very reasonable file size. Just in case.
this post was submitted on 11 May 2025
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friend please use this revelation as a motivation to help preserve wikipedia
any backup or donation you make is literal, powerful resistance against the information dark age
Wikipedia is better than the Library of Alexandria, its incredible
I love how much knowledge we have at our disposal. If we can accumulate generational knowledge on how to navigate such a dense information landscape then I think we'll be fine.
We just don't know what to do with all this info and how to protect ourselves from needless outside influence.
My big optimism is that the diffusion of knowledge has been one of the most stable and powerful drivers of equality throughout history.
There has been an unparalleled explosion in knowledge availability in the past 75 years. With the introduction of broadcast television, then cable television, then the early Internet, then services like Wikipedia and beyond the amount of knowledge available to the public has snowballed exponentially. This is so obviously true that denial is risible on the face of it.
But what is also obviously true is that over that same time period the threat of authoritarianism has been on a steady rise. At first the domain of "communist dictatorships" and a bunch of little countries here and there with right-wing assholes in charge, the world is now faced with rising tides of populist authoritarians where there was one presumed-healthy democracies, and with tightening grips in places that had already been authoritarian.
... the diffusion of knowledge has been one of the most stable and powerful drivers of equality throughout history.
So this seems sus.
We all see inequality rising. So, yeah, the forces driving inequality are stronger than those driving equality right now.
I was paraphrasing Capital in the Twenty First Century. Knowledge diffusion is consistent, and it definitely decreses inequality. Its also been happening for all of history. As well, it is hard to remove diffused knowledge from a population.
That's what I mean when I say:
... the diffusion of knowledge has been one of the most stable and powerful drivers of equality throughout history.
I left out that the drivers of inequality can be much stronger, but I wanted to talk about the part I was optimistic about. I am told from every friend and media outlet that inequality is rising. OP seemed to be more down lately so I wanted to share something nice.
I'm kinda trying to get back to how it was in the past a bit.
Realize that life happens outside of the internet, and I don't need to read a stream of news from the other end of the world that I can't do anything about and don't affect me yet.
I read actual news sites once a week only these days. Sometimes news stories cross my Mastodon feed that seem relevant to me, but most times I just pass them over.
I can't change the way chucklefucks in the USA behave, for example, and reading about them shooting themselves in the foot so often they think walking around and leaving bloody footprints is normal is not something that I can change, nor do I need to know it. Same for most countries that are neither my country of residence nor my country of citizenship.
So I ignore it. Because it's literally irrelevant to me, my knowledge or lack thereof will change nothing, but constantly hearing doom & gloom stories has a measurable negative impact on my sanity.
can't even read
I can have it read to me in synthesized GLaDOS's voice, even!
This is only sort of related but I was talking to someone about the Medieval ‘dark ages’ and it led to us wondering what the ancient greek ‘dark age’ (proceeding plato et al) was like because it seems odd that civilization with such complex ideas about ethics and metaphysics and geometry sprang out of a dark age.
After digging in it turns out historians no longer really refer to it as a dark age (rather, they split this period into the ‘postpalatial bronze age’ and the ‘prehistoric iron age.’). The reason we considered it a ‘dark age’ in the past is because they didn’t really have writing, but historians realized this was because there was a strong oral tradition in that region at the time where ideas were passed through song/poetry etc. so the presumption that it was a dark age by historians in the past was mainly because historians had a bias towards literacy/writing. The oral tradition obviously doesn’t leave a written archeological record so it makes sense that historians privilege societies that had writing just because we can know more about their ideas, but it’s doesn’t paint an accurate picture of the past if we pretend complexity only comes with literacy.
A lot of the time, "dark age" pretty much literally just means that we don't have much information (i.e. because they didn't write).
I don't recall which of the Greek philosophers hated writing, because it would make it so people wouldn't bother to remember anything anymore.
Learning more about the Greek culture of the bronze age really makes me wish they didn't have such a big impact on western culture, given how misogynist and slave reliant they were. ACOUP has a great series of articles on how the real Sparta worked (a shithole place where more than half of the population were slaves, plus their warriors were just average)
Sort of related, I've been reading a series of blog posts about ancient Rome and Greece. Super interesting stuff, and it happened so long ago! At the same time, the ancient romans and especially greeks were slavers (Sparta was literally 85% slaves, Rome was comparably egalitarian with just 15%) and were really into the "glory" of battle, which was often really bloody especially for the Romans (in other places/other time periods, battle seems to have had surprisingly low lethality).
If you're interested, the series on Sparta is a pretty neat (and horrifying) introduction for that blog: https://acoup.blog/2019/08/16/collections-this-isnt-sparta-part-i-spartan-school/ The blog author is a college teacher who is specialized on antiquity, btw.