A History of the Internet — and Who Shaped Who

A history of the internet, told as a question about ourselves

Well… How Did We Get Here? is a work of accessible non-fiction about technological determinism — the long-running debate over whether technology shapes society, or society shapes technology. Drawing on thinkers from Marx and McLuhan to Shoshana Zuboff and Jonathan Haidt, and tracing the actual history of the internet from a Cold War military experiment to the smartphone in your pocket, the book makes the case that both are true — and that the conversation between them is where everything interesting lives.

Nobody voted for the attention economy. Nobody planned that a Finnish student’s hobby project would become the operating system of the internet. Nobody intended that the World Wide Web — given freely to humanity by one man who believed information should flow without permission — would become the architecture of surveillance capitalism. And yet here we are.

Accessible, personal and evidenced, this book traces the open-source idealists who built the internet’s foundations, the attention merchants who built an economy on top of them, and the neuroscience of what the smartphone in your hand is doing to your brain right now. It is for anyone who has ever wondered how, exactly, the world came to look like this — and whether there is still time to shape what comes next.