You need to anchor information in something.
It’s how you don’t need infinite personalized family pictures, too, you need the real ones and those few/many good memories.
The reason they are doubling down on this is, I think, the financial and emotional investment into the idea that a communication medium can produce a new message, a search engine can add value other than search of what you know you’re looking for, and so on.
It’s how since my socially dysfunctional childhood I wanted a 3D sandbox world where you can make and live “anything”, but felt that to be strange and unreachable, that’s because one wants to make and live specific things threaded together into one life.
Or, similarly, a deus ex machina like these LLMs. Something that takes ungodly amounts of data and gives evaluations that look like magic.
Also thank god people made that crap so I’m no longer excited.
So, getting back to these people, the possibility of such things and popular belief into them are what gives them jobs. This won’t stop until impossible to maintain.
EDIT:
What I mean is that, say, there’s garbage collection in programming languages, and it’s done by tracking referenced objects with references leading to some root ultimately, like an environment linking objects to their bodies, tra-la-la.
Societies and cultures are not radically different, just if you build search and information discovery (including commercially available content) on such reference graphs, advertising dies and platforms die. And most importantly, generated content dumped into the network dies as a source of advertising revenue and attention, because it has the references erased, it won’t be found in such a search system.
(I have a conspiracy theory that Aaron Schwartz was pressed to suicide because his work could evolve to threaten search engines and social networks, on their blietzkrieg at the moment. RSS is a step in that direction, there was also the semantic web that didn’t take off.)
These people are usually not stupider than me, definitely, so I think they can see this too, that they are sort of boat drivers near a waterfall.
Of course nothing will die, it’s like any other thing in history, if things developing peacefully and naturally kill your farm, you go and kill that natural peaceful development and make something else. If you can. It’s a matter of resulting power balance.
So, before someone reading this silently discards this as idiocy or smartassery, it’s an opinion (like any other).
EDIT2:
The references comparison is not to hyperlinks than anyone can post. It’s to transparent connections like PGP web of trust, smart contracts. To make gathering of content to be indexed similar to garbage collection built on smart contracts, based on trust to authors and human-made lists like web directories of old. That would make it decentralized and resilient to slop and spam. Also almost unusable for advertising and “Google, tell me what to look for, I don’t know that myself”, so probably nobody would want that.
Would also require something content-addressable, partially, and more like Usenet in the sense of being centered around groups and their posts (linkable), not services you connect to.
Anyway, that’s a mania again. I can’t even build a fucking Forth system for a few weekends already. Only started something resembling it yesterday evening.
They are doing that right on the picture.