the new knowledge monopolies [...] don't actually produce knowledge; they just sift and organize it. We rely on a small handful of companies to provide us with a sense of hierarchy, to identify what we read and what we should ignore, to pick informational winners and losers. It's incredible economic and cultural power that they have amassed because of a sudden change in the strange economics of the commodity they traffic in, a change they hastened.

David Foster Wallace called the condition Total Noise. With it, our reading became peripatetic, less focused.

It's sometimes hard to grasp the pecuniary motives of the big tech companies, because they strike such an idealistic pose.