What to do when the ‘public good’ of information goes bad

THE creation, communication and exploitation of knowledge are the defining abilities of human beings as social animals. These capacities, more than anything else, made them masters of the planet.

This makes our tools of communication – from language to writing, printing, telecommunications, radio, television and now, the Internet – the defining technologies of their eras. Their invention and use have shaped not just what we can do at any time, but who we are.

New technologies of communication transform society. As the late Jurgen Habermas argued, liberal democracy, now in peril, was the child of the book, the pamphlet and the newspaper. The digital technologies of our time are similarly transformative.