This chapter explores a line of influence in the architecture of American intentional communities from the Associationist movement of the nineteenth century down to the hippy communes that emerged in 1965, built, after Drop City, around the shape of the geodesic dome. This hippy modernism borrowed freely from the ideas of Charles Fourier and Buckminster Fuller and fostered a community that included Stewart Brand, who went on to think about the shape of space colonies and early models of the Internet.

The book opens with a discussion of the theoretical importance of the rise of social media, focusing on the way that decreases in transaction costs of communication change the potential for populations to solve their collective action problem. In addition, it highlights the historical importance of social media as a data source, with scholars having access to the communications of the public en masse for the first time. The cheapness and accessibility of this data democratizes data collection efforts, which changes the nature of research questions that can be asked by scholars.

An introduction to the book, a literature review, and a discussion of methodology and sturcture.

Karpf explores how online conspiracy theories, disinformation, and propaganda havechanged over the 25-year history of the World Wide Web. Drawing a historical comparisonbetween digital disinformation in the 1996 and the 2016 presidentialelections, the chapter explores how the mechanisms of online diffusion, the politicaleconomy of journalism and propaganda, and the slow, steady erosion of load-bearingnorms among political elites have combined to create a much more dangerous contexttoday than in decades' past. The chapter concludes with a discussion of how technologyplatforms, political elites, and journalistic organizations might respond to the current stateof online disinformation.

This chapter examines the way digital technologies reinforce racialized social hierarchies. Charlton McIlwain argues that cultural histories of the internet typically exclude black history, and that such an oversight makes it difficult to grasp how racial representations and institutional structures have long-shaped computing systems. Sketching a history that extends back at least to the 1960s, he shows that governments and corporations have long sought to develop technologies that would thwart any attempts at challenging racialized hierarchies and that such efforts can be seen today, as in the revelation that IBM used New York Police Department surveillance footage to develop technology that uses skin color to search for criminal suspects. He argues that any effort to challenge racialized social hierarchies have to consider the technological grounds on which their struggles are waged. While acknowledging that digital tools have been immensely useful for recent movements like Black Lives Matter, he argues that any effort to address technologically enabled racialized hierarchies, which he terms “Afrotechtopolis,” must develop its own technologies.