Possibly you recall the “Information Superhighway,” a phrase popularized by then-Vice President Al Gore to describe the internet. The expectation was that universal connectivity would lead to widespread enlightenment and social progress. Instead, we got QAnon, TikTok, metastasizing superstition and the cult of Donald J. Trump — a speedway to delusion and disorder. We got social media: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, etc.
Maybe we shouldn’t have been surprised. After all, the newspaper where you’re reading this probably runs an astrology feature — an ancient belief system based upon a pre-Copernican understanding of the heavens in which stars were believed to orbit the Earth and to influence human events.
