The flipside of his argument is, of course, is it really a good idea to rely on silos like Twitter, Yelp, StackOverflow, and Wikipedia for all our knowledge res

The flipside of his argument is, of course, is it really a good idea to rely on silos like Twitter, Yelp, StackOverflow, and Wikipedia for all our knowledge resources? Those then represent single points of failure, which can be taken down by an errant backhoe or intercepted (and surreptitiously altered?) by the NSA. Google, on the other hand, will aggregate more sources of information than just those, and it's unlikely they can be taken out by a backhoe. (The NSA is still a problem, at least for interception, but perhaps not for alteration...)