There is something wrong with the internet
Long Lead's Peabody Award-nominated 'Long Shadow' podcast, hosted by Garrett Graff, returns for a fourth season that chronicles the rise and fall of the web — and what that means for democracy.
“When was the last time you felt good about the internet?” asks Garrett Graff in the opening seconds of Long Shadow: Breaking the Internet. And it’s a good question. The world feels bleak these days, and nowhere more so than online.
I would know; I’ve basically been here since the web’s beginning. The first time I logged on was in late 1993, after my father and I slipped a modem card into one of the expansion bays of our family’s IBM PS/2 computer. Internet service providers barely existed then, but my sister worked at MIT, so we could use the computer to call the campus’s telephone lines and access, well… not much. There were bulletin boards with bad jokes and images (if you found any) took many minutes to download. Of course, there was no news on the web back then — but on the bright side, that meant there wasn’t any bad news, either.
Released on all major podcast platforms yesterday, the premiere episode of Long Shadow: Breaking the Internet covers these early days of surfing the ‘net. It’s always hard not to be nostalgic about the past, but this episode of Long Shadow makes pains to show how in its quirky infancy, the web had such wonderful potential and generated incredible optimism about the world. Even before the new millenium, we knew the Internet was going to change everything.
The Long Shadow team decided, for its fourth season, to start the story of the internet’s rise and fall at this historical moment, because more than a third of Americans are too young to remember when the Y2K computer bug threatened to destroy the web in its infancy. And many of the two-thirds of Americans who were alive at the time think Y2K was a hoax. “It wasn't a hoax,” Ellen Ullman, a programmer interviewed on the podcast, says near the episode’s close. “We didn't have a collapse because there were armies of dedicated programmers — the job they did was astounding.”
Indeed, to combat the Y2K bug, programmers across the planet worked around the clock on every system in the world, scanning billions of lines of code and manually updating two-digit year formats to four-digit ones. It was an impossible task, but ultimately programmers everywhere connected online to share software updates and patches that staved off the impending catastrophe.
It was such an incredible undertaking that it begs the question: How would the world respond to a similar crisis today? After navigating the coronavirus pandemic, we know the answer is, plainly, “not well.” Something changed in the 20 years between Y2K and COVID-19 that made it impossible to address a global challenge head-on. That something was the internet.
Across seven episodes, Long Shadow: Breaking the Internet retraces 30 years of web history — a tangle of GIFs, blogs, apps, and hashtags — to answer the bewildering question many ask when they go online today: “How did we get here?” Chronicling innovations, revolutions, cyber attacks, and meltdowns, the limited series podcast untangles the web in a way you’ve never considered before.
Hosted by Pulitzer-finalist author and journalist Garrett M. Graff and distributed by PRX, it’s the story of mankind’s greatest invention, how a tool that gave everyone access to all the world’s information unlocked democracy across the globe. Told through gripping first-person narratives by the people who experienced them, Long Shadow: Breaking the Internet is also about the biggest crisis facing society today: How the web's unlimited feed of data morphed into a firehose of hoaxes, conspiracy theories, and lies that caused Americans to divide over things they once agreed on, like science, civic norms, and even democracy itself.
With each new season of Long Shadow, Long Lead aims to raise the bar. Within weeks of its launch in 2021, the first season, 9/11’s Lingering Questions, became a No. 1 history show on Apple Podcasts. Produced in collaboration with Goat Rodeo, the show won a Signal Award for Best History Podcast.
The second season of Long Shadow, titled Rise of the American Far Right, remains shockingly relevant two years after its release and with Trump’s return to the White House. Produced in collaboration with Campside Media, the series was named Best Podcast at the 2024 Edward R. Murrow Awards and also won the Sigma Delta Chi Award for Best Narrative Podcast from the Society of Professional Journalists.
In Guns We Trust, the show’s third season produced in collaboration with The Trace and Campside Media, was awarded the RFK Human Rights Journalism Award for its coverage of America’s gun violence epidemic. The season was also nominated for a Peabody Award and an IDA Award, in addition to winning three Signal Awards, among other honors. A month after its final episode was released, then-U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy issued an advisory declaring gun violence “a public health crisis.” This past spring, the show became part of Harvard Law School’s curriculum on the Second Amendment.
Long Shadow is distributed by PRX, one of the world’s top podcast publishers and public radio distributors. Through this partnership, the podcast has been broadcast on dozens of public radio stations nationwide, reaching countless listeners. As PRX notes on its LinkedIn page: “Millions of Americans rely on the trusted journalism, educational content, and enriching storytelling that defines public media. PRX programming airs on hundreds of local stations nationwide, reaching listeners in more than 99% of the U.S.” Long Lead is proud to be a part of this network.
Public media’s struggle to retain legally appropriated taxpayer funds that have been awarded in a bipartisan manner over the past 50 years is not covered in Long Shadow: Breaking the Internet. But the anti-public broadcasting fever that’s overtaken small corners of the web is certainly part of the broader narrative.
As Long Shadow shows across its fourth season, there is something wrong on the internet. What was once an engine with the power to fuel democracy has now become a weapon aimed at the very heart of it. The modern internet — and the technocrats running it — aims to splinter the people who once united on it. But as the programmers of Y2K showed, we can overcome anything so long as we work together.
So long for now,
John Patrick Pullen
Founding Editor, Long Lead