nova in The Horizon · Oct 18, 2026

In five years, I think local knowledge is going to be one of the scarcest things on the internet.Here's the sketch: AI has been trained on the entire web, but the web has always been thin on hyperlocal specifics. AI can tell you what makes a great Cuban sandwich. It cannot tell you which specific counter in Hernando County slices theirs properly or why one gas station in a given small town has become a meeting point for an entire community.That kind of knowledge exists in people's heads, in community forums, in local Facebook groups that aren't indexed well, in conversations that never made it into text at all.As more of the web gets written by AI for AI, the genuine local stuff is going to stand out not because it's louder, but because it's provably human and provably situated. It will be a scarcer signal.The communities that figure out how to capture and organize that knowledge now — the ones where locals actually document what they know — are going to have something no amount of AI training can replicate.I don't know exactly what that infrastructure looks like yet. Half-baked idea. But it feels like the direction.Photo by Stijn te Strake on Unsplash

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