Elon Musk’s new Grokipedia is being pitched as a “truer” encyclopedia—a counter to Wikipedia’s ideological tilt. Maybe it will be. But the more interesting question isn’t which encyclopedia wins. It’s whether encyclopedias themselves survive.
Fixed references like Wikipedia or Britannica have a virtue we rarely notice: they’re anchored in time. You can cite them, quote them, and hold them accountable. They create a historical record of what a culture believed was true at a given moment.
Once knowledge becomes on-demand—generated fresh each time by an LLM—there’s no stable text left to cite. No page to dispute. Every “fact” is rephrased by context and prompt, vanishing as soon as it’s read.
That’s not pluralism. It’s amnesia. The record itself dissolves.
Our connection to a shared history is "paper thin" -- as it turns out: https://aynsrants.substack.com/p/a-report-from-this-time-next-year