The internet once promised to strengthen our associational life. Instead, A Bounded Web shows that digital technology has replaced bounded institutions, where members gather to make decisions together, with porous social networks that platforms administer behind the scenes. In response, scholars and policymakers tend to reduce the pathologies of digital life to technical challenges that demand technocratic solutions. Against this trend, this book offers a new approach to technology policy that emphasizes the need to rebuild diverse and robust associations both online and offline. It defends proposals ranging from smartphone bans in schools to encouraging the creation of 'middleware' and even pursuing 'digital Sabbath' policies to reshape our collective management of technology. Rigorously argued, A Bounded Web asks us to recognize what we've lost and imagine what we might build in its place.
