To many, the advent of the alt-right and Bannon’s social media machinations meant that the utopian dreams of the early internet creators had been naive; that their efforts to connect people had instead created, as one writer put it recently, “a nightmare machine.”4 But I think something different is going on. If we’re worried that our communications networks are becoming clogged with human misery, we might look to the misery rather than the networks.
