In the immediate aftermath of the Cold War, intellectuals throughout the West began to hope that the longstanding liberal ideal of the “open society” could be applied to the whole world, with nations everywhere embracing free trade, porous borders, and the easy movement of people and capital.
Advances in technology — especially improvements in communication and the transmission of information — would be a big part of this process of ever-increasing openness. The overriding assumption at the time was that the more we talked to one another, and the more we built and used digital networks to facilitate interaction across our differences, the more we would come to note and appreciate our similarities.
