The Internet Was Meant to Liberate Us—Instead, It Enslaved Our Minds: Why Books May Be Humanity’s Last Sanctuary
The Dream of a Liberated Mind, and the Machinery That Replaced It
The earliest promise of the internet felt like fresh air rushing into a stale room. Human knowledge, long trapped behind paywalls, institutional gates, and the slow drip of printed circulation, seemed suddenly to dissolve into a frictionless atmosphere. A high schooler without a library card could wander the corridors of mathematics, philosophy, literature, and physics. A small-town poet could find readers in languages they didn’t speak. We told ourselves that the bottlenecks were finally gone: information would be abundant, attention would be generous, culture would be plural, and the public sphere would be widened by every new voice that joined. In that youthful optimism, we mistook access for understanding, abundance for...




