Availability and that which I have the opportunity to know

It is a feature of the technological society, or being as availability, that we think, like the early Wittgenstein, that the world is a totality of facts. These facts are available for our knowledge. We think that our capacity to know is a capacity for the uncovering of the facts which are available for our knowing. Since the world is the totality of facts, then, if we cannot know a fact, it is the failure of our knowing, not a failure of the fact. The fact is there. Our knowing must get at it, as the mouse must get at the cheese, or as we must get at, say, our pen after dropping it under the couch. We know the pen is there. We just need the right method or tools for getting at it.
	This picture of the relation between world and thinking is deeply flawed, but the necessary result of being as availability or standing reserve. It arises from the following set of ideas. The development of telecommunication technology, culminating with the internet, makes it so that there is the possibility of knowing immediately things that, before such development (where ‘development’ ought to be understood in a neutral way, not, as it is commonly assumed, as positively charged), would not have been assumed as knowable. For example, the development of phones allows you to not be in the dark regarding whether there is milk in the house when you are not at home, when you can call your wife and ask her if there is. Before, the vehicle for the knowledge of the fact was restricted to your capacity to see if there is milk. New tools allow for new manners of knowing. Which itself expands our expectation of what is knowable. With the internet, this expectation reaches a ridiculous height: the fact that we can look up “facts” through the search engine, now even personalize questions so the artificial “intelligence” replies with what people assume often to be authoritative, relevant, even true information, constitutes the illusion that everything is in principle within the reach of our knowing. The illusion harms the care for the epistemic process. Why?
	The epistemic process naturally requires patience and method. With the development of the thing called ‘the internet’, the epistemic process becomes flattened to simple input-output scenarios. We no longer have to think through things and understand a better way of coming to know the object that we want to know. We no longer treat reality as complex. Rather, the internet, search engines, and artificial intelligence provide the illusion that our questioning the epistemic process was like a vending machine, where you put in the question, and you receive a fact. Both the epistemological object (reality, truth) and the epistemic subject (yourself, as a questioning being) become degraded through this process. 
	One might object it is better to be able to know more things, as it “democratizes” knowledge. But what is the point of being able to “know more things” when the very meaning of knowing, the epistemic process itself, is thereby debased? The result of such a “democratization” of knowledge (setting aside the obvious issue that the search engines and artificial intelligences do not even provide what they are allegedly meant to provide, that is, reliable information) is its devaluation, the loss of its meaning and significance for the good of human life. We think we find ourselves in a “better” epistemic situation than, say, the ancient Greeks, because now there are so many available facts for our knowing. The world is no longer a mystery. This both hides the truth of the world and cheapens the manner of our engagement with it. The ancient Greeks had to come up with an idea of the object of their inquiry, and come up with the creative means of how to better approach the object so as to achieve their purpose. In contrast, the technological society flattens our expectations of the method for truth. The result might be called the vending machine model of the epistemic process, which I described above. The world as the machine full of “facts” that we extract after putting in the correct input.