There was the ascent of the digital realm—with the happy surrender, on the part of hundreds of millions, to the congenial omniscience and possibly less congenial omnipotence of Google, and the perplexingly popular appeal of making available online all manner of information of the sort formerly considered private. Who would have dreamed, at the decade’s outset, not only that something like Facebook would exist but that, thanks to it, anyone would be able to view photographs of the company’s C.E.O., Mark Zuckerberg, in pajama bottoms and with red-eye uncorrected, lounging in an armchair and clutching a Teddy bear to his chest? Or that anyone would want to?
