It’s often pointed out, usually in a tone that suggests you’ve been caught stealing the silverware, that America invented fast food. It’s true enough but technically inaccurate; street vendors have sold quick meals on the go since at least the Han Dynasty and ancient Rome. Fast food, as we think of it, is a misnomer. What we mean by the term has less to do with speed than scale, the ambition to put a McDonald’s or a KFC or a Starbucks on every street corner in every country in the world. Not just scale: megascale.

We’re still getting our mega-scale fix, it’s just shifted online, an endless free buffet of low-nutritional-value information available 24 hours a day, anywhere, everywhere, even on the toilet. The social web, companies like Facebook, Google and Twitter are driven off an engine so improbable not even Douglas Adams imagined it, free content from mostly free labor, plus a fundamentalist belief in never having a point of view if they can help it. As far as the companies that comprise the social web are concerned they’re simply themed forms of instantaneous, frictionless, judgment-less information delivery.