Who Rules the Information Regime?

“Information wants to be free,” went a saying among early internet pioneers. Techno-optimists, toggling uneasily between supposedly neutral statement of fact and hopeful prediction, believed that the internet would decentralize power and bolster individual agency, taking back control from the twentieth century’s meddlers and authoritarians. In that way, the information age might shore up the principles of the American republic and renew the “Spirit of ’76.”