The Internet Is Not the Answer

upon a time, companies paid people to walk up and down the street wearing so-called sandwich boards that displayed advertising. Now we all do it for free.

Rather than fostering a renaissance, it has created a selfie-centered culture of voyeurism and narcissism.

Rather than fostering a renaissance, it has created a selfie-centered culture of voyeurism and narcissism

The future is already here—it’s just not very evenly distributed,” the science fiction writer William Gibson once said. That unevenly distributed future is networked society. In today’s digital experiment, the world is being transformed into a winner-take-all, upstairs-downstairs kind of society. This networked future is characterized by an astonishingly unequal distribution of economic value and power in almost every industry that the Internet is disrupting. According to the sociologist Zeynep Tufekci, this inequality is “one of the biggest shifts in power between people and big institutions, perhaps the biggest one yet of the twenty-first century.20

This view of the Internet encapsulates what Mark Lilla calls the “new kind of hubris” of our libertarian age, with its trinitarian faith in democracy, the free market, and individualism.19

The Internet,” Joi Ito, the director of the MIT Media Lab, notes, “is not a technology; it’s a belief system.”14

This experiment is the creation of a networked society. “The most significant revolution of the 21st century so far is not political. It is the information technology revolution,” explains the Cambridge University political scientist David Runciman.11

The Unfortunate Fact Is That Online Journalism Can’t Survive Without a Wealthy Benefactor or Cat GIFs,

Gross Domestic Freebie,

The Narcissism Epidemic: Living in the Age of Entitlement