Digital disconnect : how capitalism is turning the Internet against democracy

Celebrants and sceptics alike have produced valuable analyses of the Internet's effect on us and our world, oscillating between utopian bliss and dystopian hell.

McChesney argues that a society drenched in commercial information is a democratic one.

He says the Internet is not naturally' commercial. Capitalism's colonisation of the Internet has spurred the collapse of credible journalism and has made the Internet a place of numbing commercialism, an unparalleled apparatus for government and corporate surveillance and an anti-democratic force.'