The decentralized web made of blogs and open publishing inspired PKM. Traditional knowledge management (KM) was top down, as Dave Pollard noted in 2005, “So my conclusion this time around was that the centralized stuff we spent so much time and money maintaining was simply not very useful to most practitioners. The practitioners I talked to about PPI [personal productivity improvement] said they would love to participate in PPI coaching, provided it was focused on the content on their own desktops and hard drives, and not the stuff in the central repositories.” It was obvious 20 years ago that top-down knowledge management does not work for people.
Then the open web created a way to curate knowledge bottom-up. It was fuelled by bloggers and sharing on social media. I started this blog in 2004. This worked for a couple of decades until generative AI and large language models scraped everything we collectively had shared online and now big tech offers it back to us served from a black-boxed set of algorithms.
Basically, Gen AI has taken what we have collectively built and sucked it up in order to feed it back to us top-down. We built the knowledge in these platforms. These AI platforms want to think for us, even though they are based on our thinking. I think not.
“The promise of generative AI is that it can think for us. That is a truly fascist idea, the idea of outsourcing thinking; and so our power is in our ability to think with each other. To generate genuinely new ideas” —Naomi Klein
In order not to become digital serfs we have to ‘“think with each other”. It may not be on blogs but we have to find ways to connect human-to-human, without a disembodied AI-bot telling us what to do. I’m not sure what the future of PKM will be but we really need to work on bottom-up sensemaking.
If you want to dig back in time — while this blog stays online — there are some related posts below.
I decided to post this on le 14 juillet — the anniversary of the storming of the Bastille prison by the people of France in 1789.
Lamentable state of affairs, and seemingly ‘with us’ from now on.
And this is the bigger issue, it seems.
“Today, the greatest risk AI poses to society is the exacerbation of inequality and the concentration of wealth. The real problem is trillion-dollar AI companies and their trillionaire oligarchs cozying up to political power in Washington and governments worldwide, and using their money to enact their agenda over the popular will of the people.”
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/jul/09/ai-datacenter-company-politics
It’s quite scary. I think we’re at or close to a stage where much of what has been changed will become permanently woven into our societies.
It looks like the mainstream media are catching on to the con.
“As they scramble to keep their systems online, AI companies are making things expensive for the rest of us. Large language models such as ChatGPT and Claude are so resource-hungry that tech companies may be purchasing 70 percent of the world’s supply of high-end computer memory, causing a shortage. As a result, the prices of computer memory and storage are skyrocketing: Hard drives that I bought for my reporting two years ago for $350 each were $800 when I checked two weeks ago, and are now out of stock. The prices of some laptops have gone up as much as 50 percent, and low-cost computers are being hit the hardest. Affordable entry-level computers may “disappear by 2028” according to one forecast. And the memory shortage is expected to continue for years.
The memory is being put into data centers, which tech firms are expanding at incredible speed. They are planning to multiply total U.S.-data-center capacity by a factor of eight over the next few years. The demand for electricity at these sites is already so great that some companies are repurposing jet engines to power them.”
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/2026/07/generative-ai-engineering-disaster/687901/
Thank you. Irreversible. Highly dangerous.
Between you, me and the gatepost (ok, and all the followers of your blog), I’m not entirely confident of the future of our society.
I can’t even imagine what it means for the generations after us.
A world and society missing curiosity? Imagination? Awe? Connections? Creativity? Enquiry? Research? Inspiration? ….sad state of affairs.