If you really want to support quality literary production, pirate the ebooks but support political parties that advocate for UBI.

"the internet offers an escape from solitude for those rejected in the real world, allowing weirdos, nerds, and the painfully shy to make social connections in ways that would have been impossible for their counterparts in earlier decade."

That statement might have been true in 1995-2012 about forums, IRC, early social media, and Tumblr. It is not really true for the average young internet user today: the corporate platforms centered around phone apps seek to maximize engagement, not provide community.

It is a small number of people who will ever step outside the walled gardens and explore other spaces, but they might find even those other spaces unfulfilling as a sense of community. The fediverse has copied a lot of pathologies from corporate social media. Forums are ever fewer and with a graying demographic that won't necessary give a young person a feeling of connection with peers. Discord does offer some of the close-knitness of old-school IRC, but discoverability is a challenge.

You can see this on Goodreads, which in decades past saw active community about all kinds of literature, but now is overwhelmingly centered around romance and romantasy novels. There must still be a lot of people out there who read other stuff than romance (or genre fiction in general), but I'll be damned if I know where they can hang out and feel community online, let alone IRL. Literary blogs are few and have largely retreated into Substack, which is a pathological for-profit corporate platform. Goodreads is declining because its old tech was less attractive to younger readers. Competitors to GR like Storygraph tend to be designed mainly for fiction instead of the full range of things an erudite person might read.

In fact, it was a far more optimistic time than since about 2020, as soaring cost of food and going out means even privileged middle-class people are complaining, and infrastructure improvements have stagnated.

Also, part of getting older and wiser, and becoming more aware of history, is knowing the damage that old people like us have done at times. It was people our age who caused the failure of May '68, for example.

Today, no one you will see the content that you posted to help other people out. Google began deprioritizing personal blogs a decade ago already, and now a whole generation has come up that doesn't know the open web is a thing. When people look for tips in this hobby, it is overwhelmingly on phone apps like Komoot or PolarSteps, on the general image-based social media like YouTube or Instagram, or (already for an older-skewing crowd that still uses browsers) on the big for-profit website Bikepacking.com that grew by using its SEO-fu to wipe out the non-profit-driven scene.

There is a community around this hobby, one with a lot of IRL interaction, and people do enjoy that feeling of community. But claiming that people "aren't really your peer" if they don't use the old open web that we knew, is just cutting yourself off from that.

The debate is solely about how much the Socrates of Plato's dialogues represents the views of the historical figure.