It wasn’t supposed to be like this. When the Internet emerged in the mid-1990s, it was heralded as an unprecedented technology of human empowerment; a place where human beings could meet, learn, and express themselves, transforming our society for the better. It was also hailed as a realm of privacy, in which those empowered humans could read, connect and communicate on their own terms, safely cocooned in bubbles of anonymity where, as the famous New Yorker cartoon put it, ‘no one knows you are a dog.’
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