A huge thanks to Ellen Fishbein for collaborating for months on this essay with me. It would’ve been twenty thousand words long, instead of just a thousand, if not for her.
The overarching problem of the information sphere is a signal-and-noise problem. Sorting through the near-infinite supply of available content to find relevant, high-quality information is a Sisyphean task.
This problem exists because technology has eliminated friction from the processes of creating, publishing, sharing, and curating content. Anyone can hit “publish” anytime. This led to an exponential explosion of content: the supply of content far outstrips demand. Crucially, it also outstrips our ability to process even the very best of the available content; we’re finite creatures, after all.