> How do we put a value on the fact that, for the cost of no more than a day's labor, most in the US can have a handheld device with access to nearly the sum to

> How do we put a value on the fact that, for the cost of no more than a day's labor, most in the US can have a handheld device with access to nearly the sum total of the world's knowledge and entertainment? I know that this is a tangent to your point and I'm not trying to be pedantic, but it always crosses my mind when people mention "access to all the knowledge and entertainment" — how much that would actually cost someone, even with the internet? For knowledge — You have access to Wikipedia and it's a great resource for what it is, and more and more, universities are making some of their material available for free. But there's still an awful lot of academic knowledge that's locked up in research journal subscriptions and a huge amount of knowledge & expertise in e.g. industry text books from publishers like O'Reilly. For entertainment, leaving aside piracy (as otherwise a discussion on costs seems odd), how much would it cost you to be able to access all TV, films, music, books? You'd probably need recurring subscriptions to multiple platforms to even cover main-stream (Prime, AppleTV, Disney+ etc.) Then there's titles that aren't on any subscription service, etc. I wonder how many days labour it would cost to actually get access to all of these?