In the Kingdom of Noise, by Francis X. Maier

By Francis X. Maier, The Catholic Thing, March 26, 2025

Francis X. Maier is a senior fellow in Catholic studies at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. He is the author of True Confessions: Voices of Faith from a Life in the Church.

Here’s a fun fact:  In December 1990, the planet had exactly one website, created by Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web.  A year later, total global websites numbered 50.  By December 1993, there were 623; by January 1996, 100,000; by April 2008 (around the time The Catholic Thing started), 162 million.  Today the number is north of 1.1 billion.  About 4 percent of those websites are pornography-related.  Predictably, given the potholes in human nature, porn-related web searches are sharply higher.  But overall, for better or worse, it’s now almost impossible to imagine (or remember) a world without Google search, Amazon shopping, and unhinged YouTube videos like The Sound of Music: Action Recut.

I mention this because we humans have a genius for wandering into problems we should have seen coming.  Here’s an example. …

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