I have a conspiracy theory this was intentional, about the greatest library. The system that happened was intentionally built to end like this.

The mechanisms that led it to this point were simple and easily predictable (which is why they were not present in previous concepts, like NLS and Xanadu and such dream systems), and follow from the fundamental structure. Mechanisms solving these flaws also emerged early enough - siloed services and search engines. Companies providing the main offerings to solve these flaws followed in a few years. And they are still here.

See, this has been built up in like 30 years, right? Then surely much of the material will enter a better built system (reverse links, transparent identities, delay-tolerant, versioned, global and message-oriented, not connection-oriented, and so on)?

Yes, but less because of reliance on the wrong system. It was a trap to siphon the most effort. There will be no similar explosion of enthusiasm in a global networked system. Just like there will be no similar explosion of enthusiasm in communism as there was during 20s’ USSR.

It’s what secret services do, among other things - encourage underground activities to control those and detect participants and make the effort go in a predictable direction. Similar to preventive activation of mines.

Some things’ only good media would be preserved in the main medium used for their reading and reproduction, but the main medium became, say, some scan stored in some Internet service not caring about it. So they will vanish.

At the same time - the road from first printed Bibles to the French revolution to printing millions of student books on math, for example, took a long time. But also, with the speed information travels, we might expect new wonderful things in the following decades which won’t all be dystopian. Of course we should also prepare for bloodshed.