Because of the Internet, our lives are significantly different. Writings on any topic, no matter how obscure, can be found with a quick Google search. Citizens can challenge powerful authority figures such as the police by publishing videos of their misdeeds. Remote workers can participate fully in company life, and relatives can video chat each other cheaply from nearly anywhere in the world.

The rise of the Internet has revolutionized publishing.

Yet, these innovations are only a fraction of what the adopters of the early Internet hoped to accomplish. Google searches and blog posts are innovations of a particular type: innovations in communication. That is, the rise of the Internet has revolutionized publishing. Anyone can be a creator and distributor of content, and anyone can access and read it. However, a subset of early Internet adopters (who go by many names: cypherpunks, crypto anarchists, and Internet Exceptionalists, to name a few) thought the Internet would go further. They thought we would have an Internet revolution in economics and in law.