These Truths: A History of the United States

by Jill Lepore

The Internet, a bottomless sea of information and ideas, had profound effects on the diffusion of knowledge, and especially on its speed and reach, both of which were accelerated by smartphones. If not so significant to human history as the taming of fire, it was at least as significant as the invention of the printing press. It accelerated scholarship, science, medicine, and education; it aided commerce and business. But in its first two decades, its unintended economic and political consequences were often dire. Stability, in American politics, had depended not on the wealth of the few but on the comfort of the many, not on affluence but on security, and a commitment to the notion of a commonwealth. The Internet did not destroy the American middle class, but it did play a role in its decline. It fueled economic growth and generated vast fortunes for a tiny clutch of people at a time when the poor were becoming poorer and the middle class disappearing. It turned out that the antimonopoly regulations of the industrial era, far from being obsolete, were sorely needed in the information age. And the vaunted promise of Internet connection, the gauzy fantasy of libertarians and anarchists who imagined a world without government, produced nothing so much as a world disconnected and distraught.