The internet is a manifestation of cultural tendencies that have been snowballing since the Renaissance. I don’t think we can understand politics, I don’t think we can understand the economy, I don’t think we can understand the culture wars without seeing them as downstream of a seismic shift in self-understanding that has a religious character, or at least it has a set of metaphysical, ethical, spiritual assumptions about who we are, who the world is and how we’re meant to interact with it.

How did we become a world of self-makers?