Your own source [2] says:

> But to be clear, there is no evidence DARPA or the U.S. intelligence services had any role in the creation of Facebook.

No way, we've known for 15 years that it was the CIA, not DARPA, after The Onion broke the story:

https://youtu.be/ZJ380SHZvYU

I disagree. I feel like earlier social networks hadn't yet huffed the "lean startup" gas and weren't obsessed with engagement and thus were not yet trying to hook their users into an engagement cycle like where we are today.

I feel like the Myspace/Friendster and early Facebook were nowhere near as harmful (albeit for addiction, those sites were still vulnerable to grooming) as where we are today.

OG Facebook was perfectly fine. In your analogy it’d be more like someone replacing your Diet Coke with actual cocaine. Like, yeah Diet Coke isn’t great for you, but it’s not cocaine.

Elitism and selectivity were actually features of the early Internet. High barriers to entry (tech savvy, literacy) ensured that there was a high signal to noise ratio, and thus you had, let's say, upper quartile participants concentrated in one (forum of) fora.

I disagree. I'm of the Neopets/Pokemon forums generation. Elitism and selectivity were not what made that era a good balance between the caustic free-for-all we have now and the rich kid's playground from before. It was the technical and practical restrictions on what you could put in and get out of a web experience.

You couldn't upload thousands of thirst traps every month, because storage was limited. You couldn't summon another head of the dropshipping or affiliate marketing hydras with a few clicks, because the infrastructure didn't exist. You couldn't inundate users with dark patterns designed to extract every ounce of attention, data, and cash possible, because the rich web wasn't that rich yet.

You had to deal in text and reasonably-sized images on a CRT with a limited-bandwidth pipe feeding it all. Because of this, many of the techniques developed to transform so many other forms of media and so many other institutions into Capitalist hellscapes and high school, respectively, didn't work online. Until they did.

> I wonder if this is how the clergy felt once the vulgar were...

You meant the "vulgus". "Vulgar" has the same root, but a very different meaning.

This random thought is kinda disconnected from actual human history. "Not allowed to study Scripture" was not a thing: Illiteracy was. There were people that knew how to read and people who didn't, that's it.

I'm trying hard (and failing) to visualize your mental image.

"Dear Father: it looks like the Bible has been translated to English by my dear brothers up at the monastery. I'm sure you understand why I can no longer be a priest"

Remember that you're living in the actual earth timeline, not the 40k one.

And Greek! Don't forget Greek

-emacs user

I mean, one can always get an older machine and code everything as holy binary chant not only impress the youngsters, but also impose level of distance from the 'limited by llms'.

FWIW, I like the analogy despite seeing a benefit to knowing the original languages to studying scripture.

> I am wondering where to hang up my Techpriest robes in search of more elite pastures.

Capital and tech improvement will beat anyone chasing that.