OLDER politicians are having a lot of trouble with facts these days. It used to be that if you heard something it was reasonably safe to repeat it, particularly if it seemed to advance your cause.

Now, not only should they have spent five seconds Googling that tidbit but, as sure as God made the little fishes, everyone else will be giving it a once over. If the “fact” was based on old and discredited research a great deal of embarrassment will ensue.

After some initial awkwardness with plagiarising Wikipedia (anti-plagiarism technology having marched further and faster than dull-witted copy-and-pasters) school students now have opportunities the rest of us could only have dreamed of.

Twenty years ago a student had to trudge to a local library and hope the book they found was vaguely current. It was not a process that encouraged an enquiring mind, especially when the trudge home in time for dinner was in the dark and a settling frost.

Now anyone can become a subject matter expert given the slightest motivation and a spare hour.

The effects of all this vast access to knowledge are still raining down on the landscape all around us.

Have you tasted just how good coffee has become? Cheerleaders gasp about “Canberra coffee culture” but it’s going on everywhere.

Here Coffee Lab, the Cupping Room, Tonic, Harvest, Two Before Ten and, of course, Lonsdale Street Roasters (to name but a few) are turning out coffees today that were undreamed of short decades ago not just in Canberra but in Paris or Rome, in large part because knowledge is flowing harder and faster than we ever dreamed.

Small beer makers are now able to find niche audiences for specialist styles and the dreary homogeneity of Australian lager is being shattered. Canberra now has three thriving breweries in the Wig and Pen, Bentspoke Brewing and Zierholz.

Thanks to knowledge gained entirely from the internet I now operate a hot smoker with astonishing precision and make hot beef sandwiches better than I, or my friends, ever dreamed of.

I needed to join two pieces of sheet metal the other day to fix my partner’s watering can. Twenty minutes watching YouTube videos and I was ready to tackle a pop-riveting job.

No-one who knows how to operate a modern mobile phone will ever be lost in a city ever again (incidentally, governments could probably axe the budget on street signage at this point).

Importantly, very smart people can mix with their peers online which means two things:

1) They won’t be as lonely.

2) When they realise they aren’t unique snowflakes any more they’ll hopefully stop being such arrogant jackasses.

Boredom, like cold, hunger and immunisable diseases, will largely be a thing of the past. While we can’t yet know what a hyperstimulated population will be like in the long term at least the unplanned pregnancies caused by chronic boredom will be a thing of the past.

It is, without doubt, a terrifying future, but so are all the best roller coasters.

John Griffiths is the online editor of citynews.com.au