Proof of the web's failure to inaugurate a new age, in which the alleged "wisdom of crowds" corrected the evasions of propagandists, comes from the US, where new technology has augmented rather than diminished the paranoid strain in American politics. The raging Right of the 1990s used it to accuse Bill Clinton of getting Arkansas cops to procure women for his carnal purposes, run guns, smuggle drugs and order the murder of his former business partner, Vince Foster. The fury culminated in the Drudge Report's revelation that Clinton had had sex with an intern, a claim which stood out from the rest in that it was at least true, but which in most countries would have led to gossip rather than the attempted impeachment of the president. When George W. Bush took over, Moveon.org replaced Matt Drudge and said that the second Iraq war was all about oil and that Bush and Blair were cowboys, liars and the reincarnation of Adolf Hitler. Now that a Democrat is back in the White House, the heirs of the rabid Right are again the loudest voices, and rumours fly that President Obama is a secret Muslim or an alien whom the Supreme Court should disbar from office because he was not born in the US.

Technophobes look at the gruesome spectacle of US politics and the vast online audiences for 9/11 conspiracy theories and mistakenly see the future as a high-tech dark age in which isolated ideologues read only websites and newspapers that confirm their prejudices. I don't believe it will happen because the prevailing style of Fisking does not produce isolation but a furious engagement. In Britain, Guido Fawkes, a conservative blog that is so successful it has twice the readership of the New Statesman, does not argue for right-wing policies. Like most other conservative bloggers, he takes their inherent merit for granted and devotes his time to disparaging the Left. Instead of conducting a thorough debate on why its government has failed, Left-wing blogs imitate the Right and respond in kind. For neutral readers, it is like watching drunken football fans shouting abuse at each other.

In his impressive book, Here Comes Everybody (Allen Lane, 2008), Clay Shirky accepts that alongside the dissemination of knowledge and the building of new social and intellectual networks, the internet is producing masses of third-rate material. We should not be surprised, he says, because history is repeating itself and vast amounts of rubbish followed Gutenberg's invention of movable type in the 1440s. But, he continues, we should not despair either because the Gutenberg revolution eventually allowed "the public scrutiny of elites, the international spread of political foment and even literate women". We can be sure that the internet will bring a comparable liberation. Shirky is by a considerable measure the most interesting and thoughtful of the web utopians. His moments of slack-jawed credulity are thus all the more telling. The invention of printing certainly disseminated knowledge as well as nonsense, but his idea that print also produced political progress is absurd. The most striking political feature of Europe in the three centuries after Gutenberg was not the liberation of the newly-literate public but the rise of absolute monarchs, who wiped out medieval parliaments. Britain escaped but only just. Parliament fought a civil war against Charles I and deposed James II because it feared the Stuarts wanted to import absolutism. To its 17th-century admirers, absolutism was not an antiquated system that conflicted with the new technologies of the age of print but the most modern and dynamic form of government available. The authoritarian state derived domestic legitimacy from its promise to prevent the anarchy and civil war, the liberties of old Europe had fostered, and foreign legitimacy from the success of Louis XIV's armies.

I am not saying that the printing press caused autocracy — simply that absolute monarchs could live with it and exploit it for their own purposes. They, along with the Georgian oligarchy in Britain, banned books and licensed printers. They allowed debate outside the political sphere, most notably debate about scientific research and limited dissent. But if a printer published arguments that threatened the state, they sent him to prison.