The web browser was invented in 1995. Five years later, the dot-com bust cleansed the market of frenzies and created a template for more long-term projects. Facebook opened to the public in 2005. Google bought YouTube in 2006. The iPhone came out in 2007. The app economy began to emerge in 2008.
By 2012, cooperation across digital platforms was remarkable, and advertising had not yet taken over the main portals. There were no omnipotent monopolists but only large industrial players among millions of options. Competition prevailed in most areas. Social media and the app economy were in a boom stage.
What everyone thought would be chaos ended up being very orderly and wonderful, with no direction from the top and no centralized plan. This is why I called it a beautiful anarchy.
The book included celebratory essays on a large number of social media sites, explaining their roles in people’s lives and their contribution to making the world a better place.
My big theory was that the digital cloud represented a new frontier that brought out the best of the pioneering spirit that built the West and forged generations of explorers, builders, and agents of enterprise and improvement.
Here we sit in 2024 and truly wonder: What happened?
My mistake was in thinking that this new-found freedom could last and last and nothing could ever happen that would change it. This prediction of mine, which of course turns out to be entirely wrong, was based on the idea that national governments could never manage to do to the internet what they had already done to the physical world. I believed that this new form of freedom would last forever and that this ethos of liberation would grow and grow.
Twelve years later, we face a very different situation. The old internet celebrated freedom and codified speech rights as foundational. The new internet has been reimagined as a rules-based stakeholder model dominated by large corporations, governments, university partners, and large foundations.
When this change became clear (to me) about five years ago, I found myself deeply embarrassed that I could have been so wrong. How could I have written a large book celebrating the achievement and permanence of something that seems to be vulnerable and shrinking, even as the social media I once promoted became fully captured, censored, and psychologically ruinous for addicts?
Why didn’t I see it?
The more I’ve considered this, the more I’m happy I wrote this book 12 years ago, if only to establish a documentary history of what was and could be again. I now look at this as a valuable piece of archival evidence that what the first and second generations of great builders and achievers did resulted in wonderful things. They didn’t need top-down edicts, censors, regulators, courts, and officious fact-checking organizations.
Freedom worked. It gave humanity instant access to all the great literature of the past, made the history of films available in a click, provided astonishing new services such as internet phone and video at no charge to the whole of humanity, and reduced the costs of education and innovation to a fraction of what it once was.
It was my own belief back then that when something works this well, humanity would rally around it, protect it, copy the model, and build a future based on that. This is a point I never argued for. I merely assumed it to be true.
At the time that I was writing the book, I did engage with people who pushed back on my techno-utopianism. One entrepreneur had started a new email service that sold its services based on the promise that there would be no backdoor access given to any government agency. He was told that this was impossible. Instead of giving in, he decided to close the company.
His message to me was that the internet is not inherently free. It can be cartelized and controlled given enough time. I ruled this out based on my ideological conviction that power is not that smart, that the spontaneous action of market actors would always outwit plans to control them. On all these points, he was clearly correct and I was clearly wrong.
As we look at the internet today, we discover a world very different from that which existed 12 years ago. The main portals are a product of consolidated control by about five different companies. Whole sectors such as search are nearly wholly monopolized. Search results are generated not by crowd-sourced credibility drawn from decentralized experience but rather scripted by political priorities.
The app economy, too, is dominated by monopolists who have bought their prime real estate on your phone through every manner of deal, not market exchange but made possible by huge contracts with government agencies that had become the most influential customers. The gravitational pull began toward centralization, curation, and finally canceling unfashionable and anti-“woke” opinions.
The tightening continued with the creation of “fact-check” organizations that harass content providers and tag them as false, thereby downgrading them in search results. These organizations have metastasized in many directions, to the point that they are being used by large advertisers to select their own venues.
Elon Musk made the decision to make Twitter much more like that old internet than the new one but, as a consequence, has lost many billions of dollars in revenue. As he puts it, free speech is very expensive. Truly, this is what it has come to. In other words, advertising dollars themselves are being deployed to restrict rather than expand freedom.
All of this has been a revelation to me. I had once believed that the digital world was inherently free and could never be otherwise. Now I see something very different: the cooperation of government and large-scale private industry to restrict free speech and the free flow of information.
The lesson to me is that no technology is inherently free from being used for corrupt ends. The struggle for freedom is not technological but philosophical and religious. That’s where the real battle is.
Back to my book, about which I came to be embarrassed. I no longer am. I regard it today as an homage to what once was and perhaps an inspiration to what might be possible to create again. If that happens, let us remember the next time: Freedom needs to be defended if we plan to keep it.
