The Old Routes

Digital Culture

The Boom Always Believed in Itself: What America's Ghost Towns Knew That We Don't

Bodie, California. Gary, Indiana. Centralia, Pennsylvania. These places didn't fail because of bad luck — they failed because the people who built them were running the same psychological software that every boomtown has always run. Understanding that script is the closest thing we have to a map of the future.

Mar 12, 2026

Digital Culture

The Rise, Fall, and Reinvention of Digg: A Story of the Early Internet's Most Ambitious Experiment

Before social media algorithms ruled our online lives, a scrappy news aggregator called Digg gave everyday internet users the power to decide what the world read. Its rise was meteoric, its fall was dramatic, and its story remains one of the most fascinating chapters in the history of the American internet.

Mar 12, 2026