Some might object that our current challenge is vastly different from those met by past technological changes, because we’re not just talking about a thing, like a radio or cellphone, but about changing our entire energy system. But these earlier transformations involved systems, too. Just as energy technology isn’t one thing, neither were the railroads, radio, electricity or the internet. Those systems all involved many parts, including federal, state and local policies to support them (the land grants that made the railroads possible, for instance, or role of the Federal Trade Commission in licensing radio and television stations).

What makes large-scale technological change challenging is the integration of all of those parts. Electricity wasn’t just a matter of turbines, or even turbines, power lines and transformers. Financing and regulation were also required. After electricity was introduced to the urban marketplace, the biggest obstacle to its expanded use was profitability. The private sector was able to make money bringing electricity to densely populated cities like New York, St. Louis and Chicago, but it took federal intervention, under the 1936 Rural Electrification Act, to bring it to rural communities across America.

And even then, uptake was not immediate. Rural electrification boosters insisted that hard-working farmers urgently needed electricity, but initial demand was less than expected. The Tennessee Valley Authority wanted to cut rates to drive up demand. But private utilities opposed this, worrying that low rates would threaten their financing, and the T.V.A. settled on an appliance subsidy to drive increased household consumption. Demand had to be built.

The internet was created by scientists funded by the federal government’s Advanced Research Projects Agency. Al Gore didn’t build it, but he did sponsor the 1991 legislation that made it public, which laid the foundation for the World Wide Web, Silicon Valley, smartphones and our information-driven society.

We might also imagine that earlier technologies were easier to develop because they offered immediate benefits for consumers and quick profits for business. It certainly looks that way in hindsight, because those benefits are now thoroughly integrated into our lives. But it’s not so. The historian Richard White at Stanford has shown that railroads offered almost no immediate benefit to anyone except the railroad barons, because they were built far ahead of demand, and often into places where white settlers had no interest in going. When radio was first invented, no one could figure out why any ordinary person would buy one, so programming had to be invented, which meant sponsors had to be found, which in turn contributed to the rise of modern mass media advertising.