I've been reading works from the 90s about the internet from people like Timothy Leary, John Perry Barlow, and William Gibson.

I don't blame them for not seeing this coming, but: they did not see this coming.

They imagined that the internet would allow like-minded people to find each other, and yep.

Counter-culture at the time meant distrust of corporate media and a belief that government was hopelessly behind the time in terms of technology.

The belief was that the internet was going to give people access to "the truth," and that it would increase democracy so much that government might become obsolete.

What they didn't foresee was how poor the quality of "citizen journalism" would be, and how the internet would erode and undermine professional journalism. Or, how the internet would help bad information spread as quickly as good information.

As today, the internet community back then strongly believed in the marketplace of ideas, and that good ideas would drive out bad. Kurt Vonnegut warned us that that wasn't true in "Breakfast of Champions." One bad idea ruined Dwayne Hoover's life.

We all *badly* underestimated how little interest people have in "truth," and how much interest they have in things they *want* to be true.

So, a couple of decades later, we elect the first Black president. More white people become aware of institutional racism. There's a rapid shift in support for same-sex marriage. Things are far from perfect, but the general trend is one of more tolerance.

That means, for some portion of the country, bigotry is now counter-cultural. And the internet has always been counter-cultural.

So what Leary and other visionaries didn't anticipate was that if the internet did lead to more democracy and equality, the obvious next step would be its use for the new counter-culture: fascism and bigotry. And that's where we are.