“Information wants to be free,” went a saying among early internet pioneers. Techno-optimists, toggling uneasily between supposedly neutral statement of fact and hopeful prediction, believed that the internet would decentralize power and bolster individual agency, taking back control from the twentieth century’s meddlers and authoritarians. In that way, the information age might shore up the principles of the American republic and renew the “Spirit of ’76.”
Today’s network of fact-checkers, disinformation commissars, and NGO technocrats didn’t get the memo. Instead of a reined-in government, Americans got a national security state whose reach into citizens’ lives has extended further with every decade. Instead of the free flow of ideas and the open exchange of arguments, internet users faced censorship and demands to stifle all offensive content. Instead of a new generation of digital homesteaders, the digital economy was led by massive corporations angling to make their products a requirement for basic participation in modern life. As Americans today struggle to reassert their sovereignty and restore self-rule, they will need to make sense of what went wrong.
