Packets of Light

About This Book

In the autumn of 1969, a tired graduate student tried to log in to a computer four hundred miles away. He typed two letters — L, O — and the system crashed. Almost no one noticed. From that unglamorous accident grew the most transformative machine humanity has ever built: a planet-spanning network that now carries the money, the memory, the commerce, and the conversation of the human species.

This is the whole sweep of that astonishing story — the telegraph that first turned thought into electricity; the strange, thrice-invented idea of chopping data into packets; the building of ARPANET and the quiet triumph of the protocols that still move nearly every byte you send; the invention of the World Wide Web and the gift of its creator, who gave it to the world for free; the wild dot-com gold rush and its crash; the rise of search, social media, and the smartphone; and the network's reckoning with surveillance, misinformation, and the concentration of power.

Clear, vivid, and honest about what we know and what is only myth — that the Internet is the Web, that it was built to survive a nuclear war, that it sprang from a lone genius — this is popular history at its most illuminating: the unforgettable account of how a handful of human choices wired the world, and what we must decide about the network we have all inherited.