I would not be here if giants didn’t exist in the past, you would not be reading this and probably cavemen would be still wondering about in the green plains next to the Victoria Lake.

Mankind thrives thanks to findings, the social and collective effort of thousands of generations of human beings, working restlessly to push the limits beyond imaginable. If this sounds very biblical to you it’s because it is: as a civilization we triumph thanks to the thousands that tried, missed, retried and eventually succeded at something great.

Greatness is sometimes very compelling and immediately recognizable, such as the findings of Marie Curie or the inventions of Da Vinci. More often than not though, greatness is hidden from the first eyesight, it’s not on the surface of the events but on the backstage, constituting the backbone of the new advancements.

Being at the edge of the human restless research efforts, Technology is one of the most impacted fields with respect to giants’ contribute. We’re living now the years of a blossoming AI and deep learning ecosystem that is almost totally build upon theorems, papers and intuitions dating back to the ’60s and ’70s: the old ideas and their proponents are the giants of today’s advancements, with no doubts at all.

Free access to open ideas

I’m profoundly convinced that the blossoming of innovation comes as a consequence of freedom to read and learn from other’s findings, sharing with them ideas and being able to build on top of one’s conclusions. This attitude was well known back in the days when scholars belonging to different countries shared almost freely relevant scientific findings despite being citizens of hostile countries.

But academia is not the only beneficiary of these tendencies. Even private citizens, free individuals can leverage the openness of information sharing to refine their knowledge, create new products and services, sharpen their knowledge of the world.

And since information is freely available online, we’re pointed towards democratization of knowledge, openness of information sources, liberty to freely read and share any findings, especially the ones that were so selflessly given to us by giants of the past, isn’t it?

Paywalled gardens

The definition of giant that I provided above is still too strict: we need to understand that even anonymous contributors to StackerOverflow are giants, because millions of visitors can benefit from their generous contributions to create new things and thrive. Even reddit weirdos can be giants, forum members can be giants, Quora top voted answers can be as valuable as essays.

All these platforms and online spots have one thing in common: people can meet, help each other freely and leave a trace that is still relevant for anyone in the future, possibly helpful to anyone that is bothered enough to search carefully and find the content again.

Detailed answers in technical forums and blogs are as important as documentation and official materials, a tribute to Mankind knowledge assembled with the efforts of silent knowledgeable individuals.

So what?

Despite tons of efforts, the online world started shrinking and redistributing its volume of users into paywalled gardens of knowledge, where the access to information is now conditioned to the creation of an account. Discussions are now held as twitter threads (yeah, I know now it’s called X, but the new name is so annoyingly strange that I continue to deadname it); access to APIs is being shut down from basically every social media, short content content is spreading beyond repair. Communities started burying themselves into closed platforms like Discord, Telegram groups, Whatsapp communities: there every community-related discussion is held without letting then successful discussions and answers come out of the paywalled garden. The once blossoming web of forums and community websites is now dying under this exodus of users.

Free riding on the shoulders of giants

In economics, the free-rider problem is a type of market failure that occurs when those who benefit from resources, public goods and common pool resources do not pay for them or under-pay.

Contributing to the open discussion and flow of ideas is like paying the price of the great contributions that were submitted by other knowledgeable users, perpetuating and consistently alimenting the Heritage that open ideas left to us.

By closing ourselves into paywalled gardens we destroy the opportunity for our peers to benefit from our legacy, but we also limit the future users’ chance to build on top of our findings, we destroy our opportunity to be contributors to the unstoppable stream of human ideas.

Ultimately, free riding on the shoulders of giants benefits nobody, it’s a badly thought time discounting choice that can terribly impact the value and efforts that were made to make information freely available, giants’ dixit easily accessible and the Internet an open protocol for ideas.

Internet