My friend, SJ Klein, recently wrote a provocative essay where he made the case for knowledge as a social infrastructure rather than a commodity. He starts by noting: For ages, learning was assumed to be social, interactive, oral. Written knowledge, where available and somewhat portable, was a specialized complement that few scholars, recordkeepers, explorers and other specialists used or needed. He goes on to explain that while the cost of creating texts dropped, knowledge about the world remained scarce. As a […]