But the internet revolution, which was supposed to empower us, is increasingly enslaving us. The web’s decentralized architecture has become intensely centralized. What was created to enrich democracy is enabling a tyranny of virulent trolls and other antidemocratic forces. “The internet is broken”: thus conclude digital pioneers such as Twitter cofounder Evan Williams and Wikipedia cofounder Jimmy Wales. Like Williams and Wales, more and more technologists are recognizing that today’s networked transformation is writing us out of our own story. The internet might have been described as the “people’s platform,” these critics say, but in fact it has a people problem. Jaron Lanier, the inventor of virtual reality and Silicon Valley’s most poignant thinker, even admits to a nostalgia for that halcyon time in the last century when technology did, indeed, put people first. “I miss the future,” Lanier confesses.