I do a lot of complaining about technology in this column. I complain about the influence of tech corporations over public life. I complain about how AI presents any number of existential economic and cultural dangers. I complain about how Elon Musk and Sam Altman are doing the handiwork of the devil himself. There is, in my defence, a good deal to complain about, and I’ve got a column that needs writing. But I’ve been giving a lot of thought over the last while to one particular product of tech culture about which I’m wholeheartedly positive, and for which I’m profoundly grateful: Wikipedia.

It seems increasingly obvious to me that Wikipedia is among the truly great cultural achievements of recent decades. It’s an amazing and inspiring thing – both an endlessly useful tool and an infinitely ramifying monument to the value of knowledge. The fact that it is the work not of a publicly-traded corporation – of vainglorious executives and pampered employees – but of a vast network of ordinary people who are strangers to one another, invests it with not just a practical but a symbolic value. It represents everything that the internet can and should be, a utopian set of possibilities which, having animated the early online era, have mostly been buried under a trash heap of targeted advertising, hateful propaganda and useless AI slop. It must be protected at all costs.

[ Capitalism is incompatible with any kind of human flourishing on this planetOpens in new window ]

I have always valued it, as much for its idiosyncrasies as for its incredible expansiveness, but I have probably been guilty, over the years, of taking it for granted. Not any........

© The Irish Times