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The tech denizens wear pseudo-utilitarian garments, like the knitted, machine-washable shoes that she deems “a monument to the end of sensuousness”

Wiener has a gift for channeling Silicon Valley’s unsettling idea of perfection and for reminding us of its allure. She gets the appeal of building something “so beautiful, so necessary, so well designed that it insinuated itself into people’s lives without external pressures,” and of creating an existence “freed of decision-making, the unnecessary friction of human behavior.”

The man-children who hire her really believe they can change the world by selling e-books, analyzing data, offering a code-sharing service.

Bizarrely, and predictably, the tech people offer tech fixes for our shredded civic fabric: “a Marshall Plan of rationality,” say, or “crowdfunding private planes to fly over red counties and drop leaflets.

In “Lurking,” the tech writer Joanne McNeil also excavates recent histor

It’s a cheerfully digressive book, organized into chapters that each tackle some fundamental property of the Internet. The first chapter, “Search,” traces the evolution of Google and people’s relationship to inquiry. “Anonymity” revisits the early groups that homesteaded in cyberspace, while “Visibility” and “Community” take us through the sites (Friendster, Myspace, Facebook) that successively colonized it.

“Sharing” meditates on the circulation of images and language. “Clash” presents a brief history of online activism. “Accountability” explores how well-structured sites might contain bad actors.

To grasp the Internet we know today, we have to remember the freer, weirder, more innocent pseudonymity that thrived on the World Wide Web before major tech companies swallowed it whole.

“Lurking” is more like infinite scroll. Having picked your platform, you float on the current of content, thick with froth and detritus and the occasional treasure, until something makes you ask: Wait, what? How did I get here

In rewinding our recent Internet history, both books remind us of just how deeply living online has overloaded our thought patterns, installing in our hindbrains a thrumming and consta

our primary concerns are the low- to moderate-level cyber attacks from a variety of sources, which will continue and probably expand.”

Though Clapper likened the operation against OPM to activities carried out by the United States, much of Thursday’s hearing was preoccupied with the lack of norms in cyberspace and how the absence of a common framework, such as the Geneva Conventions, has resulted in a highly permissive environment. Discussions within the global intelligence community have ratcheted up recently, Clapper said, about how to provide some “rules for the road” governing conduct in cyberspace.

According to the spy chief, the next frontier in cyberspace will feature the manipulation of data, rather than theft or destruction. Such tools, Clapper said, could be used to alter decision making, and prompt business executives and others to question the credibility of information they receive.

Until now, the Internet has mainly created new avenues for old behaviors. Roughly nine of 10 computer breaches involve theft or business espionage,

You cannot do a cost-benefit analysis of something that imperils society’s economic and political foundations. The plausible cost is infinite

It does jeopardize our way of life. It undermines the integrity of our political institutions and popular faith in them.

More than this, it warns us that our physical safety and security are at risk. Hostile hackers can hijack power grids, communication networks, transportation systems and much more.

What Putin and Russian hackers allegedly did shatters this pattern. Their hacking — as interpreted by both the CIA and the FBI — qualifies as state-sponsored aggression

The rise of cyberattacks, says a recent report from the American Enterprise Institute, ranks with three great strategic shifts in military history — first, the rise of sea power; next, the advent of air power; and most recently, the opening of space.

The emergence of cyberspace “poses the most daunting challenge yet . . . [because] its implications are more sweeping,” AEI asserts. It touches almost every aspect of society and alters the nature of global conflict.

We could move some vital data networks offline — that is, we could build systems independent of the Internet.

Another possibility is to impose security standards on the “Internet of things

It’s also possible to streamline agencies overseeing cyberspace.

Americans are of two minds about the Internet. They love social media and gadgets, such as smartphones. Meanwhile, they hate its threat to privacy and the dangers of hacking. Putin’s gift to America is that he is forcing us to face the contradictions.

The problem is not just Russia’s bad behavior. It’s the nature of the Internet. If we don’t acknowledge that, we will increasingly become its victim.

Ms. Howerton herself can delete the comments under her own YouTube video. On Twitter, some of the accounts that have attacked Ms. Howerton and her family have been suspended; some have not. Twitter makes the determination about what constitutes hate or harassment

Her reaction encourages Danielle Citron, a professor of law at the University of Maryland and the author of “Hate Crimes in Cyberspace,” who notes that the support of the overall online community is key. Anyone who makes a living writing and speaking “can catch the attention of a hate group anytime,” she said, and shouldn’t be expected to shoulder the blame for the attacks. “There is nothing that constitutes a meaningful provocation for something like this,” she said. The more we recognize that, the less destructive these kinds of attacks will be.

It isn’t just the racist attacks that could silence Ms. Howerton, and deter other parents from writing and sharing their family experiences online. It’s the shame and fear that accompanies those attacks — the sense of being judged for putting their children’s images at risk, and the fear that their children will suffer as a result. The racist attacks themselves may be inevitable, but the judgment is not.

With the stories, we’re talking about people. Without them, it’s all abstract. To have a real conversation about race, we need some people willing to stand up and take a bigger risk. To support that conversation, the rest of us need to stand with them.

In interviews, bloggers described the silencing of Ms. Ma as a clear warning to independent media in China: The party is in charge, and writers must play by its rules.

The party seems concerned that independent commentators, who have become a primary news source for China’s more than 800 million internet users, are drowning out its propaganda messages

“Bloggers are seen as encouraging discontent in society and potentially causing social instability,” said Hu Xingdou, a political economist in Beijing.

Such blogs represent one of the last bastions of relatively free discourse in China and have proliferated in recent years as the state-run news media has become more heavily focused on praising Mr. Xi and his policies.

For many writers, blogs are a lucrative business, with readers paying small fees for content and advertisers paying for mentions of their products. To avoid China’s strict laws on news gathering, many bloggers occupy a gray area, framing their views on current events as commentary.

The freewheeling competition for eyeballs has led to an alarming rise in fake news, a concern that the government often uses to justify its crackdown.

But Mr. Xi is targeting much more than false information. The authorities have blacklisted writers who traded celebrity gossip, analysts who discussed rising property prices and advocates who wrote about problems in the countryside.

Since December, the authorities have closed more than 140,000 blogs and deleted more than 500,000 articles, according to the state-run news media, saying that they contained false information, distortions and obscenities.

But while the range of banned topics in China was once clear — independence movements in Tibet and Taiwan, and the bloody crackdown in Tiananmen Square in 1989, for example — the party’s red line has become much more ambiguous.

China’s trade war with the United States is now considered sensitive. So too, sometimes, are musings about the futility of work, a theme often derided by censors as promoting “slacker culture.”

Li Yongfeng, who runs a popular book review channel, said he avoided publishing articles that mentioned social movements or past or present political leaders, even to offer praise.

“At the end of the day, it is up to authorities to decide what constitutes ‘positive energy’ and what does not,” she said.

In December, the Cyberspace Administration of China listed offenses by bloggers that included distorting government policy and party history, “flaunting wealth” and “challenging public order.”

An account that focused on women was suspended last year after the authorities said its posts on sexual health were “distasteful.”

Similarly, an account run by a nonprofit named NGOCN was shut down in December after it published articles on a chemical spill in eastern China

Increasingly, the party is seeking to limit content that depicts life in China as a constant struggle.

“It is becoming unbearable,” Mr. Wang said. “The party simply can’t tolerate anyone who has a big influence on society.”

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he buried his Democratic opponent Walter Mondale in a landslide, winning 49 out of 50 states and 58.8% of the popular vote.

Bill Clinton's boast of building a bridge to the 21st Century rang true, although it was emergent tech giants such as Microsoft, Apple and Google that were the true architects and engineers. Thirty years after planting the Stars and Stripes on the Sea of Tranquillity, America not only dominated outer space but cyberspace too.

The Los Angeles riots in 1992, sparked by the beating of Rodney King and the acquittal of the police officers charged with his assault, highlighted deep racial divisions.

The American compact, the bargain that if you worked hard and played by the rules your family would succeed, was no longer assumed. Between 2000 and 2011, the overall net wealth of US households fell. By 2014, the richest 1% of Americans had accrued more wealth than the bottom 90%.

Although his presidency did much to rescue the economy, he couldn't repair a fractured country.

The political map of America, rather than taking on a more purple hue, came to be rendered in deeper shades of red and blue.

he gang-related mayhem in his adopted home of Chicago. The mess in Washington. The opioid crisis. The health indices even pointed to a sick nation, in which the death rate was rising.

There were chants of "USA, USA," a staple of the billionaire's campaign rallies - usually triggered by his riff on building a wall along the Mexican border.

here was also an 80s vibe about the telegenic first family, who looked fresh from a set of a primetime soap, like Dynasty or Falcon Crest.

Trump understood this, and it explained much of his success, even if his star power came from reality TV rather than Hollywood B-movies.

In many ways Trump's unexpected victory marked the culmination of a large number of trends in US politics, society and culture, many of which are rooted in that end-of-century period of American dominion.

“This meeting is extremely timely given what is happening along the Ukrainian border with Russia,” Mr. Kuleba said, calling it the “border of the democratic world.”

“In recent weeks, Russia has moved thousands of combat-ready troops to Ukraine’s borders, the largest massing of Russian troops since the illegal annexation of Crimea in 2014,” Mr. Stoltenberg of NATO said

“These forces will strengthen deterrence and defense in Europe,” Mr. Austin said after meeting his German counterpart, Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer. “They will augment our existing abilities to prevent conflict and, if necessary, fight and win.”

The increase in U.S. troops in Germany is a strong indication of the Biden administration’s commitment to NATO and to collective European defense.

One of the two new units will involve field artillery, composite air and missile defense, intelligence, cyberspace, electronic warfare, aviation and a brigade support element.

On Tuesday, Sergei K. Shoigu, Russia’s defense minister, said that “two armies and three airborne units were successfully deployed to the western borders of Russia”

Russia is widely seen as testing Mr. Biden and keeping the pressure on Ukraine’s President, Volodymyr Zelensky, who has moved against some of the Kremlin’s favorite oligarchs.

Ian Bond, a former British diplomat who is head of foreign policy for the Center for European Reform, said that a war was unlikely now but could come this summer.

In any event, Mr. Bond said, the United States and NATO should both reassure Ukraine and “deter Russia by shifting the cost-benefit calculation in favor of de-escalation’’ — in particular by being clear to Moscow about what the consequences of a new military intervention would be.

who got the future most right? For the truth is that dystopia is now, not in some future date.

Science fiction provides us with a large sample of imagined discontinuities that might not occur if we only looked backwards.

Fahrenheit 451 (published in 1953 but set in 1999) describes an illiberal America where books are banned and the job of firemen is to burn them. (Though the novel is sometimes interpreted as a critique of McCarthyism, Bradbury’s real message was that the preference of ordinary people for the vacuous entertainment of TV and the willingness of religious minorities to demand censorship together posed a creeping threat to the book as a form for serious content.)

In a remarkable letter written in October 1949, Aldous Huxley — who had been Orwell’s French teacher at Eton — warned him that he was capturing his own present rather than the likely future. ‘The philosophy of the ruling minority in Nineteen Eighty-Four,’ Huxley wrote, ‘is a sadism which has been carried to its logical conclusion… Whether in actual fact the policy of the boot-on-the-face can go on indefinitely seems doubtful. My own belief is that the ruling oligarchy will find less arduous and wasteful ways of governing and of satisfying its lust for power, and these ways will resemble those which I described in Brave New World’. Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) is a very different dystopia. Citizens submit to a caste system, conditioned to be content with physical pleasure. Self-medication (‘soma’), constant entertainment (the ‘feelies’), regular holidays and ubiquitous sexual titillation are the basis for mass compliance. Censorship and propaganda play a part, but overt coercion is rarely visible. The West today seems more Huxley than Orwell: a world more of corporate distraction than state brutality.

Yet none of these authors truly foresaw our networked world, which has combined the rising technological acceleration with a slackening of progress in other areas, such as nuclear energy, and a degeneration of governance. The real prophets are less known figures, like John Brunner, whose Stand on Zanzibar (1968) is set at a time — 2010 — when population pressure has caused social division and political extremism. Despite the threat of terrorism, US corporations are booming, thanks to a supercomputer. China is America’s new rival. Europe has united. Brunner envisaged affirmative action, genetic engineering, Viagra, Detroit’s collapse, satellite TV, in-flight video, gay marriage, laser printing, electric cars, the decriminalisation of marijuana and the decline of tobacco. There’s even a progressive president (albeit of the Africa state of Beninia, not America) named ‘Obomi’

With comparable prescience, William Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984) anticipates the world wide web and AI. Opening in the dystopian Japanese underworld of Chiba City, it imagines a global computer network in cyberspace called the ‘matrix’. Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash (1992), which was especially popular among Facebook employees in the company’s early years, foresaw corporate overreach and virtual reality in an almost anarchic America. The state has withered away in California; everything has been privatised. Most people spend half their time in virtual reality, where their avatars have more fun than they themselves do in the real world. Meanwhile, flotillas of refugees approach via the Pacific. These cyberpunk Americas are much closer to the US in 2021 than the fascist dystopias of Lewis, Atwood or Roth.

Orwell and Huxley — have been outflanked when it comes to making sense of today’s totalitarian countries

Take China, which better resembles Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We: a book written in 1921, but suppressed by the Bolsheviks. It is set in a future ‘One State’ led by ‘the Benefactor’, where the ‘ciphers’ — who have numbers, not names, and wear standardised ‘unifs’ — are under constant surveillance. All apartments are made of glass, with curtains that can be drawn only when one is having state-licensed sex. Faced with insurrection, the omnipotent Benefactor orders the mass lobotomisation of ciphers, as the only way to preserve universal happiness is to abolish the imagination.

Chan Koonchung’s The Fat Years (2009) — which is banned in China. In this story, tap water is laced with drugs that render people docile, but at a cost. The month of February 2011 has been removed from public records and popular memory. This was when drastic emergency measures were introduced to stabilise the Chinese economy and assert China’s primacy in east Asia. Chan is one of a number of recent Chinese authors who have envisioned the decline of America, the corollary of China’s rise. The Fat Years is set in an imagined 2013, after a second western financial crisis makes China the world’s no. 1 economy.

Liu Cixin’s The Three-Body Problem (2006), a Chinese nanotechnology expert and a Beijing cop lead the global defence against an alien invasion that’s the fault of a misanthropic Chinese physicist.