Politics & Power Quote by Steven Levy

The joke lands because it’s aimed at a familiar techno-utopian bait-and-switch: the early internet sold itself as an enlightenment machine, a frictionless salon where everyone could publish, debate, and sharpen ideas in public. Levy’s “promised a society of philosophers” conjures that breathless 1990s optimism, when “democratized speech” was supposed to flatten gatekeepers and elevate discourse. Then he snaps the camera focus down to the Blogosphere’s ankles.

“Nation of ankle-biters” isn’t just an insult; it’s a diagnosis of scale and incentive. An ankle-biter doesn’t engage your argument as an equal. It nips for attention, draws blood in small bursts, and thrives on provocation rather than persuasion. Levy is calling out the early architecture of online status: speed over reflection, hot takes over slow thought, outrage as a discovery engine. Philosophers are patient and systematic; ankle-biters are reactive and territorial.

The subtext is also about the collapse of imagined hierarchy. The internet didn’t merely give everyone a voice; it gave everyone an audience metric, and with it a reason to perform. Blogs, in their most influential era, rewarded relentless commentary and competitive snark, turning debate into sport. Levy isn’t pining for old media gatekeeping so much as noting that “more speech” doesn’t automatically produce better speech. Without shared norms, editorial friction, or social costs for bad faith, the public square defaults to attention-seeking skirmishes. The line stings because it names the mismatch between our lofty rhetoric about online community and the petty, human engines that actually power it.