The Internet doesn't have to be awful

There are other possible benefits too. Rebuilding a civically healthier internet would give us common cause with our old alliances, and help build new ones. Our relationships with Europe and with the democracies of Asia, which so often feel obsolete, would have a new center and focus: Together we could create this technology, and together we could offer it to the world as an empowering alternative to China’s closed internet, and to Russia’s distorted disinformation machine. We would have something to offer beleaguered democrats, from Moscow to Minsk to Hong Kong: the hope of a more democratic public space.

Happily, this future democratic city is not some far-off utopia. Its features derive not from an abstract grand theory, but from harsh experience. We often forget that the U.S. Constitution was the product of a decade of failure. By 1789, its authors knew exactly how bad confederation had been, and they understood what needed to be fixed. Our new internet would also embrace all of the lessons we have so bitterly learned, not only in the past 20 years but in the almost two centuries since Tocqueville wrote his famous book. We now know that cyberspace did not, in the end, escape the legacy of John Perry Barlow’s “weary giants of flesh and steel.” It just recapitulated the pathologies of the past: financial bubbles, exploitative commercialization, vicious polarization, attacks from dictatorships, crime.

But these are problems democracies have solved before. The solutions are in our history, in our DNA, in our own memories of how we have fixed broken systems in other eras. The internet was the future once, and it can be again, if we remember Reith and Roosevelt, Popper and Jacobs—if we apply the best of the past to the present.