What the Men of the Internet Are Trying to Prove

Despite the archival riches and the decentralized architecture, the net’s emphasis on the light-speed transmission of data for commercial gain, combined with our all-too-human hunger for diversion and distraction, has given rise to information empires of unprecedented scope. Our new emperors give us all the information we can consume but starve us ... See more

Rather than prestige, this cultural moment is dominated by metrics, as George S. Trow predicted in a 1980 New Yorker essay called “Within the context of no context”:

“That movement... from wonder that a country should be so big, to the wonder that a building could be so big, to the last, small wonder, that a marketplace could be so big—that was the

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