The Internet Exposes Freedom’s Downside

The antisociality of social media, and the flight to authoritarian regimes

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• “The Internet is the first thing that humanity has built that humanity doesn’t understand, the largest experiment in anarchy that we have ever had.”
  ― Eric Schmidt, former CEO of Google
• “Most neuroses and some psychoses can be traced to the unnecessary and unhealthy habit of daily wallowing in the troubles and sins of five billion strangers.”
  ― Robert A. Heinlein, Stranger in a Strange Land

There was tremendous hype for the internet in the 1990s, as part of the dotcom bubble. That bubble was fueled, in turn, by the Californian cult of self-expression that goes back to the 1960s.

The Hippies’ conceit was Rousseauian: deep down, we’re childlike and innocent, so if we could free ourselves from the tyranny of social systems, we’d naturally produce an anarchical utopia. Who needs government and police when psychedelic drugs can mellow out the most hardened criminal?

Even without that utopia that never materialized, the advent of the internet was expected to channel the goodwill and creativity of semi-enlightened folks, the content creators and data junkies. We’d each have our Myspaces or personal magazines we’d curate, and fields of digital flowers would…