The Internet was how I really learned what people really thought about others, and it wasn't a nice thing to realize but it was necessary. My whole life I was suckered into this idea that people will treat you fairly regardless of your skin color, your gender, your ethnicity, the country you come from, etc. It was easy when no one would say to your face that they judged you on these things. It became difficult when you would go online and see just how many people iterated these sentiments behind a veil of anonymity.

We all thought, like the author, that access to the Internet will put people in connection who otherwise don't hear from each other, that we will be exposed to new views, be more open-minded, etc. And the opposite has happened. We forgot that the traditional barriers to intercultural understanding are still there: language, tribal sentiment, political and economic power structures, etc. At the end of the day, in a democracy the majority can do anything it wants, even if what it wants is to punish the minority. The Internet has had all the failings of a total democracy in that sense.

I also love the point the author makes at the end. Silicon Valley loves to think of itself as a bastion of rationality. But like every group and every ideological movement and every person, it has a set of core beliefs taken on faith and not on evidence. It's very possible that the core beliefs and faith on which the Internet as a radically open, radically free, nearly anarchic space was founded, are...wrong...