There was a Stargate SG-1 episode in which people were entirely reliant on a network info store to act as an arbiter of truth, and to maintain a handful of othe

There was a Stargate SG-1 episode in which people were entirely reliant on a network info store to act as an arbiter of truth, and to maintain a handful of other things that superseded the objective of returning a truthful representation of reality to the end user. A government can be thought of as an abatraction that fulfills a similar purpose. The problem is that sometimes the non-mutability of dead tree publishing is a critical feature, not a bug.