Millennials were raised to fear the internet’s permanence, which evolved into a kind of truism after Facebook: think before you share, or forty years from now we’ll all be talking about those drunk photos at your Supreme Court hearing. Our assumption was that every piece of information online was immortal, and freely accessible by everyone. Which was awesome, actually. Embarrassment was simply the price that we would have to pay for the greatest invention in human history: a decentralized, democratized, liberated Library of Alexandria at our fingertips — forever. Well, turns out we were wrong about pretty much everything.

Today, the shifting, morphing, vanishing internet, with entire Millennial subcultures, and whole historical records degraded into the abyss, is probably the single most important thing almost nobody is talking about. The internet is not only impermanent, but malleable, and that combination of qualities inherent to the information ecosystem our entire world is built upon is driving our civilization into a state of chaos. While I’ve written about these subjects with interest for a few years, Dr. Larry Sanger has dedicated most of his life to the architecture of human knowledge. Speaking with him was an honor.

Dr. Sanger is a co-founder of Wikipedia. Before his work with Jimmy Wales on Nupedia, the predecessor to Wikipedia, he was a working academic philosopher. Today, he’s the President of the Knowledge Standards Foundation (KSF), a 501(c)(3) nonprofit focused on creating the standards and tools for the future encyclosphere.