The Internet Is Not the Answer review – how the digital dream turned sour

Andrew Keen’s pleasingly incisive study argues that, far from being a democratising force in society, the internet has only amplified global inequities

The internet that we use today was switched on in January 1983, and for its first 10 years was almost exclusively the preserve of academic researchers, which meant that cyberspace evolved as a parallel, utopian universe in which the norms of “meatspace” (John Perry Barlow’s term for the real, physical world) did not apply. In fact, for most of the first two decades, the real world remained blissfully unaware of the existence of the virtual one.

And then Tim Berners-Lee invented the web, and in 1993 Marc Andreessen released Mosaic, the first graphical browser, and suddenly the real world realised what the internet was and, more importantly, what it could do. What happened next was, with hindsight, predictable, though relatively few people spotted it at the time. It was later summed up by John Doerr, a Silicon Valley venture capitalist, as “the greatest legal accumulation of wealth in history”. More succinctly you could say that what happened was that Wall Street moved west.

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