Today’s article is from a lesser-known journal that I personally subscribe to called The New Atlantis, and if your history with the Internet goes back at least 20 years, you may enjoy this read. As a Pulitzer Fellow at the Missouri School of Journalism in the late ’90s, my classmates, faculty and I were abuzz about the possibilities of the Internet, and, specifically, its ability to scrub democracy clean of corruption and misinformation by making so much unfiltered “truth” available to everyone with an Internet connection.
Twenty years on, such naivete is almost as cringeworthy as the photos of our resplendent 80s hairstyles and fashion choices from the era immediately prior. The New Atlantis revisits these heroic assumptions about the democratizing Internet, with a sobering dose of realism.