>When we no longer need each other to learn about that hole in the wall restaurant, that new band And yet the best information is still person-to-person, old s

>When we no longer need each other to learn about that hole in the wall restaurant, that new band And yet the best information is still person-to-person, old school. It lives in the cracks that software misses and where review systems are gamed. Finding good Indian food is hard - but the locals know. Who has an open mic night? Hard to say without connections. Maybe the ultimate example is real estate - deep knowledge of any given place comes after you've lived there, and understand it's history, is life. And that's impossible to represent online. >cheap consumer goods Yes: making everything in Shenzen is a problem because now it's the only community that knows how to make and fix things. (Obviously its not 100% the case, but its mostly the case.) That lack of distributed ability has follow-on effects that we don't understand yet -- most worryingly having to do with national security, but also about agency and curiosity and self-determination. Maybe we should have to pass a test before being allowed to use any particular object, showing that we at least know how its made and where it's constituent parts come from.