Their nickname may not have aged well, but their ideas proved powerful. In the early 1980s a group of rising Democratic congressmen started calling for the American government to promote a “high-tech revolution”, to stoke the economy, to counter competition from Japan, and to help their own party shuck its statist, retrograde image. They became known as the Atari Democrats, after the company that turned television sets into platforms for a breakthrough video game, Pong. One of those Democrats, Al Gore, succeeded in passing a law in 1991 that, as he put it, would “link your computer to millions of computers around the country, give you access to huge ‘digital libraries’ of information, and deliver services we cannot yet imagine”.