About

What’s actually going on on the Internet? The world’s biggest network can appear as a totalizing, monolithic force, a mass of cables and computers entangling the earth, a network ensnaring and controlling all contemporary human culture, commerce, and politics. That vision of the network isn’t wrong, but Tales of the Net finds a different view, one that is bottom-up rather than top-down. Here we have small stories about all the diverse and astonishing things that humans are using the Internet for, a rabbit hole that leads to appreciation and compassion. In its approach there is a politics, one that asks “what if the drive toward connection and truth on the Internet led not to conspiracy, enmity, and echo chambers, but instead to the relentless openness that the early Internet pioneers promised?” I know that day won’t come, but I’m still waiting.