The internet is a place where everyone meets everyone else. It is the site of a billion different micro- and macro-cultures; it is a space where you can find out anything you want, provided humans have come up with it; it is a weirdly temporary repository of our species’s history, which will end when the server lights finally wink off.
In historical terms, it’s also very new. The World Wide Web debuted to the general public in August 1991, only 29 short years ago. And because it was a new technology, a kind of public square that felt novel and transformative, things felt lawless, and people began to behave lawlessly, as though the web was a place beyond pro-social norms. Today, that has changed somewhat, if only because now it’s easy...
