Rocket on a tricycle
Mark Zuckerberg’s appearance in April before the United States Congress, to explain Facebook’s role in the Cambridge Analytica scandal, was a watershed moment in the internet age — the first time one of contemporary tech’s titans was forced to defend the pernicious forces they’d collectively unleashed. But it was also a moment that may, according to historian Jill Lepore, have been longer in coming than many of us think.
About two-thirds of the way through her new book, These Truths: A History of the United States — an epic, 900-page narrative biography of the world’s most powerful nation — Lepore writes that “Hiroshima marked the beginning of a new and differently unstable political era, in which technological change wildly outpaced the human capacity for moral reckoning. It wasn’t only the bomb, and the devastation it wreaked. It was the computers whose development had made dropping the bomb possible. And it was the force of technological change itself, a political power unchecked by an 18th-century constitution and unfathomed by a 19th-century faith in progress.”
The decimation of two Japanese cities, in Lepore’s formulation, marked the beginning of a
