NEW HAVEN, Jan. 24 -- In a decade punctuated by the global financial crisis, the COVID-19 crisis, a racial-justice crisis, an inequality crisis, and now a political crisis, we have only paid lip service to lofty democratic ideals.

Plenty has been said, and rightfully so, about the violent insurrection at the US Capitol on January 6. Politicians are grappling with issues of legal and moral accountability. But the horrific events also touch on a critical contradiction of modern societies: the internet's role as an instrument of democracy's destruction.

It was not supposed to be this way. The internet's open architecture has long been extolled by cyber-libertarian futurists as a powerful new democratizing force. Information is free and ava...