Macro Differences

Any society preserves some records. Once the preservation was oral, now preservation comes in a range of media, including digital, including web archives. But the ideal of pk's Free Learning Exchange is still nowhere near being met.
George Bernard Shaw in Man and Superman imagined heaven as a state of being stripped of illusions: not a nice place at all. In hell things were as you wished them to be; in heaven things were as they were. Imagine Judgment Day as an event where man presents his version(s) of things: then God puts a chill on it by telling the truth.
In society we can read the Times's list of best sellers. We can buy, we can even read, the best sellers. Annually we can read the Times's announcement of the issuing of Nobel Prizes. We can read about Pulitzer Prizes. We can follow the Academy Awards. Much will be on TV. After the Awards we can anticipate reruns of some winners at local theaters.
Had pk's FLEX (Free Learning EXchange) been supported, had it been cloned into every community, had the communities cooperated in being coordinated, anyone, anywhere, anytime, could have also looked up books that didn't get a Pulitzer, movies that didn't win an Oscar ... Provided that the authors submitted them, you could have looked up digital transforms of manuscripts that didn't get published, scripts that never found a sponsor, patent applications that weren't granted ...
You can go to an old university and read theses going back centuries. At FLEX you could research those (if submitted) and (if submitted) papers that didn't earn a Ph.D., papers that were rejected. What about what the kid tried to say to the teacher but was prevented? Yes, if the kid writes it out and submits it.
What if the kid was lying? What if the kid writes it out badly? That's tough: raw data is the game.
What about God and his chilling voice of truth? Ah, with Flex anyone and everyone could try his own hand at judgment. 24/7.
Chaos? or revelation? That would depend on the judgments.I expect that some portion of visitors would know that Einstein's high school physics teacher went out of his way to sabotage Relativity, to prevent Einstein's paper from being published. How many also know that Suskind's paper first elucidating string theory was in fact rejected? Schwartz's was ridiculed. But even before that, Einstein himself delayed the publication of Kaluza's paper on dimensions for two years!
(If that's how scientists behave, what about the rest of us?)
Science depends on the recognition of peers. What if you have no peers?
Under institutional management, possible peers may be impossible to locate.
If he says, "No, I didn't," and she says, "Yes, you did," that's a difference. If we say, "Aren't we wonderful?" and God says, "Here's the truth!" that's a macro-difference. The difference is not only orthogonal, it changes the temperature, changes the season.
If the Nineteenth Century says, "Wordsworth and Byron are our best poets," and the Twentieth Century says "Shelley and Keats and Blake were just as good," the one age puts a chill on the judgment of the other age. If some other age says, "Wha'? Who cares?" that too is a macro-difference.
The macro-difference that pk imagines, and seems to imagine alone, prompts the question, How can people stand to have their information managed, packaged, edited?

Selection is fine: so long as it clearly bears the name of the selectors: These are Lefty's picks for Hialeah. This is Bob Costas's Short List of Great Sports Moments. This is Professor Moriarty's reading list for detective fiction. Here's who The NASCREEP wants you to vote for. FLEX would have made available all such submitted lists. NBC could submit a list of programs it wants you to watch tonight. FLEX, supported by NBC and by the public, would make the list available.

As FLEX coordinator, pk would say nothing. As a FLEX user, pk could say, "Ooo, I like Lefty's picks."