Nothing to Lose But Your Brains

At the internet’s dawn, some felt the universal availability of historical and current information might lead to a golden time of human enlightenment. After all, with so many facts so easily accessed by everyone’s computers—and now their mobile phones—surely we would quickly reach a point of great shared knowledge and understanding.

Interesting theory.

As it turns out, that hopeful notion did not count on a few things. Like the insatiable human capacity for cat videos. And porn. And, for all I know, cat porn (there’s something for everyone on the net). Then there was the problem of disseminating information itself. It soon emerged that misinformation is far more attractive, which goes some of the way to explaining why socialism and communism are again so remarkably popular among the young.

Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn’s rise in the UK and Bernie Sanders’s barnstorming 2016 presidential run in the US were both driven by youngsters who are really into this crazy new…