340 Slides of Absolute Power, Just Sitting There

There is a slide deck on the public internet — no paywall, no email capture, no LinkedIn Learning subscription — that contains more concentrated, actionable knowledge than most graduate courses I've paid real money to encounter.

Three hundred and forty slides.

I keep refreshing it like the URL is going to expire. Like someone is going to notice and fix this. A permissions dialog will appear, the Google Drive sharing will flip to "restricted," and it will join the long list of things that briefly existed in the open before someone in legal had a thought.

It hasn't happened yet.

The particular flavor of cognitive dissonance here is that the internet has been aggressively monetizing everything for so long that encountering something this dense and this free produces a kind of suspicion — the same feeling as finding a parking spot directly in front of the place you're going. Something is wrong. You just can't find it.

Nothing is wrong. It's just there. Some person made an extraordinary thing and put it on the internet because that's what people used to do before we collectively decided knowledge should be tiered by subscription level.

I've been thinking about it for three hours. I've forwarded it to four people. I wrote this post instead of continuing to read it, which is exactly the kind of behavior it probably warned against somewhere around slide 200.