The Day the Internet Died

How do large systems innovate, and how do they fail? Big Tech often presents itself as something unprecedented and unstoppable. This book calmly and firmly takes a different view.

Part I examines three moments when technology and infrastructure systems reshaped society, drew institutional response, or collapsed under their own scale.

The Day the Internet Died revisits the 1988 Morris Worm, a graduate-student experiment that revealed how fragile the early internet really was. The most damaging phase was not the attack itself, but the period of uncertainty. Observers did not yet understand what they were observing. Then, once they understood, those operators “killed the internet” by taking the backbones offline from each other. The author was present during those early days, watching the response unfold.

Silicon Valley Takedown looks at modern antitrust scrutiny through a historical lens. The coming reckoning for Big Tech is not primarily a technology story, but a replay of earlier infrastructure battles. This chapter centers on Northern Pacific Railway v. United States (1958) while avoiding legal trivia. The U.S. Department of Justice cites that Supreme Court case as precedent for Big Tech antitrust enforcement. Government enforcement moves slowly. But when it moves, it reshapes entire landscapes.

Transcontinental Railroad traces how ocean trade gave way to railroads, and how infrastructure consolidation shaped the origins of American antitrust law. From clipper ships to checkerboard land grants, this chapter demonstrates that antitrust enforcement follows infrastructure, not innovation. Dominant systems are displaced not by morality, but by larger systems. Unfortunately, infrastructure expansion has always involved coercion as well as growth.

Together, these three chapters form a work of historical nonfiction examining moments when large technological and infrastructure systems failed, consolidated, or provoked institutional response. Part I does not advance a unified argument or policy position, but invites you to view modern platforms through the lens of earlier systems: become, as the Department of Justice suggests, a student of history.