The Hill on the Net: Congress Enters the Information Age

In 1992, Chris Casey joined Senator Edward Kennedy's staff as a systems administrator. He had never heard of the Internet. Three years later, he had helped put Kennedy's office online, watched Congress stumble its way onto the World Wide Web, and written a book about it. The Hill on the Net: Congress Enters the Information Age, originally published in 1996, is a firsthand account of what happened when the oldest democratic legislature in the world encountered the newest communications technology on the planet.
It is a story of bureaucratic turf wars, visionary staffers, skeptical senators, bulletin board systems, Gopher servers, and the messy, sometimes comic, sometimes consequential process of wiring Capitol Hill. This 30th Anniversary Edition presents the complete original text with a new layer of annotations threaded through every chapter - capturing what came true, what didn't, and what no one saw coming.
It includes a new introduction, a new chapter on Congress and social media (from Twitter to TikTok), and twenty-six email updates the author sent to readers between 1996 and 2000. Whether you remember when Congress first got email or you've only known a world where your representative is a tweet away, this book tells the origin story of digital democracy in America - and traces what happened next.