To social scientists, this refrain will sound familiar. It is the stock-in-trade of one of the classics of early twenty-first-century political science, Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (2000). Alongside Putnam’s work on Italian civil society in the 1990s, the book helped entrench the notion that civic mores in the West were eroding, and that policymakers would need to make a concerted effort to counteract said trend. Bowling Alone thereby served as an unofficial manifesto for a new communitarian creed, intended to soften the pitiless liberalism that had triumphed after 1989. In a characteristically downbeat afterword to a new edition of Bowling Alone, Putnam found that there was no “correlation between internet usage and civic engagement,” while the future promised “cyberbalkanization” not “digital democracy.”