Atlantic, The

The internet's absence of central control, or even easy central monitoring created gaps of responsibility for maintaining valuable content that others rely on. Links work seamlessly until they don’t.

With the wholesale transfer of so much entertainment, social interaction, education, commerce, and politics from the real world to the virtual world—a process recently accelerated by the coronavirus pandemic—many Americans have come to live in a nightmarish inversion of the Tocquevillian dream, a new sort of wilderness.