Summary of “Was Aaron Sorkin Right About the Internet?”

Aaron Sorkin is a snob with an ax to grind who is right about technology.
He dismissed a young female journalist who admitted to liking Twitter as “Internet girl.” He called the internet itself a “Bronchial infection on the First Amendment.” Through his characters, Sorkin was no kinder to the World Wide Web, giving his verbose creations monologues about how lonely and unsuccessful fans of the internet were.
“Sorkin is clearly terrified of the internet and the floodgate it opens for non-white-male voices to be heard and taken seriously, and he truly, laughably believes that we’d be better off without it,” Emily Yoshida wrote for The Verge.
Sorkin’s critiques of digital life looked especially off base in the 2000s and early 2010s, when the internet was a less broken place than it now is.
The platforms looked like tools instead of weapons, and Sorkin looked like a boring crank.
My response then: What an elitist! My response now: Sorkin’s defense of accuracy standards is fundamentally sound and speaks to how deeply the internet has punctured the concept of expertise.
Sorkin’s fictional mouthpieces for his vendetta against the internet also fare much better in the harsh light of 2018.
Had Sorkin delivered his unfortunately prescient sermons about the internet’s suckage without the glib attitude, The Newsroom might be going into its eighth season, and we might not be trapped in a dysfunctional information hell vortex controlled by cash-hoarding nerds with troublingly loose relationships to the concept of democracy.

The orginal article.