We bring to the net a long, unbroken history of racism, misogyny, mistrust, and fear. The net did not suddenly teach us to hate. Turn off the internet tomorrow and the hate will still burn.

“We look at the present through a rear-view mirror. We march backwards into the future.”33

We are engaged in a ceaseless process of renegotiating our norms in a shifting reality. With more people at that negotiating table, there will be more conflict as some will demand to be heard, some will try to manipulate others, and some will claim to be canceled or censored when they may be challenged or educated. The internet thus far has been

Consider, then, the idea that the public conversation is just beginning to recover from half a millennium of creeping control by institutions, subjugation by the powerful, manipulation by malign actors, scarcity of voices, professionalization, and commercialization.

Print, its culture and economy, gave birth to the concept of content: that writing, ideas, and creativity are commodities to fill a product, a publication, which can be sold. Print led us to the notion of creativity as asset, to the law of copyright and the doctrine of intellectual property, building a fence around the commons that was

For half a millennium, the mediators of media—editors, publishers, producers—controlled the public conversation. Now we may break free of their gatekeeping, agendas, and scarcities—while at the same time risking the loss of the value these institutions have brought in recommending quality, certifying fact, and supporting creativity. What must we

Said McLuhan: “Print technology created the public. Electric technology created the mass.”34

Economically, mass media seek scale—that is, one product to serve as many people as possible; thus, deviance is expensive.

Determinism robs the public of its agency, its choices, its responsibility, credit, and blame. Another form of the deterministic debate comes from those who wish to turn the causality around, contending that print did not cause literacy but instead that literacy caused print—implying that once the necessary conditions and societal and market