NATIONAL BESTSELLER • The internet as we know it is broken. Here’s how we can seize back control of our lives from the corporate algorithms and create a better internet—before it’s too late.
“In the spirit of Thomas Paine’s Revolution-era Common Sense, this manifesto challenges us to create new digital architectures to safeguard democracy.”—Walter Isaacson, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Elon Musk
It was once a utopian dream. But today’s internet, despite its conveniences and connectivity, is the primary cause of a pervasive unease that has taken hold in the U.S. and other democratic societies. It’s why youth suicide rates are rising, why politics has become toxic, and why our most important institutions are faltering.
Information is the lifeblood of any society, and our current system for distributing it is corrupted at its heart. Everything comes down to our ability to communicate openly and trustfully with each other. But, thanks to the dominant digital platforms and the ways they distort human behavior, we have lost that ability—while, at the same time, we’ve been robbed of the data that is rightfully ours.
The roots of this crisis, argue Frank McCourt and Michael Casey, lie in the prevailing order of the internet. In plain but forceful language, the authors—a civic entrepreneur and an acclaimed journalist—show how a centralized system controlled by a small group of for-profit entities has set this catastrophe in motion and eroded our personhood.
And then they describe a groundbreaking solution to reclaim it: rather than superficial, patchwork regulations, we must reimagine the very architecture of the internet. The resulting “third-generation internet” would replace the status quo with a new model marked by digital property rights, autonomy, and ownership.
Inspired by historical calls to action like Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, Our Biggest Fight argues that we must act now to embed the core values of a free, democratic society in the internet of tomorrow. Do it right and we will finally, properly, unlock its immense potential.
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Something is deeply broken in our society, and it is getting worse fast. In this short and beautifully written book, Frank McCourt and Michael Casey show us how the internet, which once held out the promise of a better world, has been captured and corrupted by companies that take our data, ignore our rights, and harm our children. The authors then lay out what a better internet architecture would do, and they show us that it is already taking shape. This is an inspiring and hopeful book—a roadmap to ‘a digital future with humans at the center.’
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Jonathan Haidt, NYU-Stern School of Business professor, author of The Righteous Mind, and co-author of The Coddling of the American Mind