“The California Ideology”—the dream (dreamt by a handful of rich, white men in the early 1990s) that the internet would be a democratizing force of decentralized power and knowledge—was always a myth born of myopic thinking, one which failed to take into account that the internet was born within, not beyond, the strictures of capitalist relationality and brutal social hierarchy. Public access to information expanded on a vast scale, but at the same time, consolidation of power over the information network was stunning. As writer and neuro-scientist Aaron Bornstein has pointed out,

Each year more data is being produced—and, with cheap storage and a culture of collection, preserved—than existed in all of human history before the internet. It is thus literally true that more of humanity’s records are held by fewer people than ever before, each of whom can be—and, we now know, are—compelled to deliver those records to the state.