Hello there. This is Mark Bowerline with another conversation. Before we get to it, a word about one of our sponsors.

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American higher education at Wyoming Catholic.edu. We have with us today Justin E.H. Smith. He is

Professor of Philosophy at the University of Paris, and author of many things,

including Divine Madness, Leibniz and the Sciences of Life, and Irrationality, a history of the

dark side of reason. His new book is, The Internet is not what you think it is. A History,

a Philosophy, A Warning. Welcome, Professor Smith. Thank you very much

for having me, Mark. Okay, at the general discussion, at the beginning, you speak of the great

social dreams that people spun around the internet 15, 20 years ago. I remember those very well.

It seems like another age, another time, doesn't it?

What were some of those more specific hopes that people had?

Well, I suppose as I see it, there was a very long dream of outsourcing our reasoning skills to machines in a way that would improve our social life

and streamline our democracy and so on.

And the way I see it, this is a dream that lasted literally from the end

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