Introduction: The Effect of Technology

The Internet has had a tremendous democratising effect on communication. All technological leapfrogs tend to have such an effect - they radically expand access to things previously reserved for a select few.

Before the invention of the Printing Press, for example, only the elite—the clergy and nobility—could print or disseminate written works.

Electricity, similarly, democratized automation. Earlier, only certain industries or the wealthy could command labor and mechanical energy. Electricity made lighting, heating, and mechanization available to ordinary homes and small businesses.

The steam engine democratized mobility and production, and the microchip democratized computation.

What technology essentially leads to is class dissolution, and it does so not by destructive means like redistribution of resources but by creating physical abundance. When a certain utility is no longer scarce, the masses gain access to it, and the resulting productivity gain lays the groundwork for the next technological breakthrough. This pattern lies at the heart of human civilizational progress.

Taste

But the class dissolution caused by the Internet brought with it a peculiar problem.

When it comes to information consumption, every single human on earth is justifiably class-conscious. And here, class pertains to Taste, not wealth.

If you are an old zoomer, like someone born in the year 2000, you may have grown up with a TV at home where people would watch the news. Certain news channels would have a reputation for theatrical panic: fearmongering and sensationally shouting about alien encounters and hideous crimes all the time. You may have tuned into them once in a while for entertainment, but for your daily dose of headlines and to get information on important events, you would probably avoid them and prefer other, more serious channels (back when mainstream journalism had substance anyway).

You would also only watch movies that meet a certain benchmark of production quality. Even in your favorite genre, you would likely not watch random B-grade trash that puts zero effort into the story, direction, and visuals.

The generation before us used to depend on curated magazines, and people would prefer certain newspapers based on the kind of editorials and op-eds that got published in them. You would pay more to get curated content written by tasteful int...

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