Again, it's just insane to me that we don't even much have a meaningful discussion of: "Hey, wait, literally everyone could have the entire library of Alexandria in their house for a couple hundred bucks per person. Like, all the knowledge ever. Maybe that should be considered the good default of things. At least one in every town that everyone could use, for free, forever, without restriction to ANY of the knowledge…
"The African economy will start booming once they get UNLIMITED access to those 1800s manuals on measuring the Ether and where the best seal clubbing sites are in Alaska." Nobody ever thinks this through. Books are basically worthless at this point
The point you’re trying to make (I think) is that information isn’t particularly useful on its own. True. It has to be relevant. With good, useful information you still need community support (whether that’s your household or your country), funding, time, etc. But that’s going to be the case whether you’re using a book or learning from a forum, or a video. Internet videos are worthless if you have no internet. Tribal knowledge is useless if no one can get the information from the previous generation. The medium is not the problem, and suggesting that relevancy is a fault of the medium is a misrepresentation.