The internet’s promise of norm-circumvention turned mainstream once everyone flocked to it

Evidence

Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund famously lamented, “We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters.” Yet those 140 characters—and the rise of short-form content—became powerful vectors for a new kind of culture: fleeting entertainment, get-rich-quick schemes, and venomous propaganda. By 2010, digital advocate Douglas Rushkoff noted that Boing Boing, once a defining voice of internet culture, had instead become its “counterculture.” A decade later, it was even more marginal than that. Nearly everyone had flocked to the internet on the promise of circumventing the particular norms they disliked—now including the ones we once considered essential to a functional society. — W. David Marx, Blank Space, 522