The thing we find out is: when we connect people it doesn’t mean they will get along. See Europeans and Native American Indians.

See Catholics and Protestant See Muslim and Jews

No form of communication would have stopped the racism, inabilities to see other cultures and work together

People suck. Connecting them doesn’t result in utopia

There’s a fair case to be made that it delivered on that, the thesis that increasing connectedness diminished violence over time

David F. Noble's "The Religion of Technology" is a quite good read to see how we arrived at this from monastic origins.

There are some points in the book that after reading became extremely obvious, like the belief that technology can (and will) overcome human limitations, restoring us to a perfect/divine state; that technological progress is the path to transcend physical and moral limits (all of which we see in the techno-optimism of the tech industry).

It's been around forever, we are just seeing a new dress up of it with the information age, the way tech "leaders" speak has been mocked to no end in Silicon Valley because of how insufferably close to religion all of this is...

Lucky Strike thought putting a smooth and refined cigarette in everyones hand was going to bring about world peace.