By Brian C. Anderson, reposted from City Journal
Three decades ago, the visionary social thinker Peter Huber published Orwell’s Revenge, a book that turned one of the twentieth century’s most haunting political parables on its head. Where George Orwell imagined a future of total information control, Huber saw the opposite: a world where digital technology shattered centralized authority. In 1984, the Ministry of Truth could rewrite history because it monopolized the tools of communication. But in the digital age, Huber argued, the networked computer would scatter those tools across society, producing an unruly democracy of voices. The Internet, he predicted, would not empower “Big Brother” but millions of “little brothers”—individuals able to report and argue and publish. What once seemed a one-way flow of information from elite institutions to a passive public was becoming a many-to-many conversation. The gatekeepers were being evicted by the code.
This technological revolution would have profound cultural consequences. As Huber memorably put it, “Better communicating machines produce more—not less—communication, more—not less—free expression, more—not less—political involvement, more—not less—freedom of thought.” The people who controlled legacy newsrooms—highly educated and overwhelmingly left-leaning—had long exercised a disproportionate power to define what counted as respectable opinion. When those gatekeepers lost influence, new kinds of voices surged through. In a book published in 2005, I described the early energies of this revolt, chronicling how talk radio, cable news, and the early Internet—all unleashed by the mutations in communications technology—disrupted liberal cultural authority. Right-of-center ideas and perspectives suddenly found much wider distribution.