I carry the Library of Alexandria in my pocket. So does everyone else. So does the guy who is convinced the moon landing happened on a soundstage in Burbank.
For most of human history, knowledge sat behind gates: a university, a guild, a priesthood. A price few could afford. Breaking those gates ranks among the great achievements of the last century.
A kid in a Central Falls apartment reads the same physics paper as a Brown professor, watches a surgeon narrate a procedure, downloads the source code that runs half the internet, and asks a machine to explain amortization schedules until it finally clicks.
Call it open source in the broadest sense. Not just software. Knowledge itself, forked and copied and improved by anyone willing to do the work.
Nobody put the rest of it in the announcement. Ignorance forked too.
When I started policing, a bad idea had a limited natural range. A man convinced of something false had to carry it into a bar, a shop floor, a union hall, or a Knights of Columbus meeting and defend it in front of people who knew better and enjoyed saying so.
Ignorance died of exposure. It had no distribution network. Now it has one. The same one delivering the physics paper.
Falsehood behaves like an open-source project these days. It has maintainers. It has contributors refining the argument, patching the holes critics find, and shipping new versions when the old ones collapse. It has documentation, footnotes, and a citation trail that loops back to one man in a basement in Boise. Forums onboard newcomers and teach them the vocabulary. Somebody always fixes the bugs. Nobody fixes the premise.
Programmers live by a rule: given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow. The many-eyes principle makes open source work. It also assumes the eyeballs want to find the bug. Point ten thousand eyeballs at a false claim while every one of them hopes the claim survives, and the principle runs in reverse. The crowd does not debug the error. The crowd polishes it.
Twenty years of investigations taught me something useful here. Evidence carries provenance. Where did this come from? Who handled it? What corroborates it? Who benefits if I believe it?
A statement without a chain of custody is not evidence, no matter how well it fits the theory. Detectives learn the lesson early: confidence is not accuracy. The most persuasive person in the interview room is often the one with the most to hide.
Everything arriving on our screens arrives stripped of chain of custody. The peer-reviewed study and the fabrication appear in the same font, in the same feed, between the same two advertisements. Each with a number underneath indicating how many strangers approved. The interface renders truth and garbage identically.
It was designed to do precisely that.
Add machines capable of generating fluent, sourced, confident prose on any subject at any volume, and the cost of manufacturing plausible ignorance drops to roughly zero. AI has its place; I use the tools where appropriate. They earn their keep. They also produce nonsense in the same steady voice they use for facts, because fluency and accuracy were never the same thing.
Here is the part I find hardest to sit with. The comfortable version of this column blames people too lazy to look things up. The evidence points somewhere else.
Many of the people building the most elaborate false structures read primary sources, cite their work, argue with real rigor, and apply genuine intellectual effort toward a conclusion they picked before starting.
Curiosity aimed backward is still curiosity. It is also far more dangerous than apathy, because it produces something with the shape and weight of scholarship.
I have no interest in rebuilding the gates. The old gatekeepers gave us Vietnam-era body counts, redlining maps drawn by credentialed experts, and a hundred years of authorized error, and they kept honest people out on top of it.
The open library beats the locked one. It is not close. The work falls to us, one reader at a time, and it comes down to a few habits.
Ask about provenance. Don’t ask, “Does this sound right?” Ask, “Who made this? How would they know? And what do they gain if I agree?”
Ask what would change your mind. If the honest answer is nothing, you hold a belief, not a conclusion. Admit it and stop dressing it as research.
Distrust what flatters you. Any investigator will tell you the witness whose story fits your theory perfectly is the one to check twice.
We opened the library to everyone. I would not undo it for anything. But an open library shelves the forgeries next to the originals, and no one is coming to sort them for us.
Reading became the easy part. Deciding what to believe is now the job. We need to take it seriously before ignorance becomes the norm.
Joe Broadmeadow retired as a captain from the East Providence Police Department after twenty years of service, having commanded the Investigative Services Division and served on the Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Force with the FBI and DEA. Since founding JEBWizard Creative Media in 2019, he has written crime fiction, the Josh Williams and Hawk Bennett series, and co-authored true crime, YA fantasy, and literary fiction, bringing an investigator’s evidentiary eye to both his novels and his opinion writing. A 2014 Appalachian Trail thru-hiker, a grandfather, and a Cumberland High School graduate with deep roots in the town, he attended Providence College and lives in Rhode Island, or wherever his travels take him.
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