the Baby Boomers. Had they been the most destructive, selfish generation in American history? A reaction against the selflessness of their parents? Retired to leave the rest of us to pay their future medical bills and oggle their underfunded pensions, to cope with the manipulated political system they’d sued into existence. Or had they left a legacy of tolerance, an echo of 1968's optimisitic energy, a firming of American confidence. But, anyhow, Generation X? By comparison irrelevant: A collection of sad, passive slackers. But the great Internet companies were largely built by Generation X. The foundational experience of 1989 - the fall of the Berlin Wall - bred optimism. It created, in fact, the possibility for a new exploration. When we were told “Be generous in what you accept,” this seemed reasonable and, eventually, lucrative. The logic and power of networks became apparent by itself, the moment we began connecting the world. So linkage in trade and finance and friendship was pressed out into a new era of globalization, pushed as much by the smashing, enthusiastic removal of so many historical limits as it was by the technology itself. Yes WiFi and TCP/IP and other advances made wiring the world possible, but I wonder if they would have developed so quickly if the context for using them hadn't provided a feedback loop of such quick profit and reward and, frankly, amazement. So, in this fashion, we laid the groundwork for a world of billion-plus user platforms. For a new concept of power. But the Snowden papers were a shock. We knew him, in a sense. His mannerisms and thinking and technical instincts harmonized with our own. It was as if the NSA had enrolled most of the digitally visible world into a twisted panopticon ofa social network, one where your “membership” began the moment one of your data packets was sniffed or chased along fiber optic lines. Here was a secret three billion- user platform, ina sense, that had enmeshed, without their knowledge or perm