TWO CENTURIES ago Henri de Saint-Simon, a French utopian, proposed a new religion, worshipping the godlike force of progress, with Isaac Newton as its chief saint. He believed that humanity’s sole uniting interest, “the progress of the sciences”, should be directed by the “elect of humanity”, a 21-member “Council of Newton”. Friedrich Hayek, a 20th-century ...

How can democratic societies protect—and protect themselves from—the free flow of digital information? The Internet was going to set us all free. At least, that is what U.S. policy makers, pundits, and scholars believed in the 2000s.  The Internet would undermine authoritarian rulers by reducing the government’s stranglehold on debate, helping oppressed people realize how ...