“There is nothing more mysterious than a TV set left on in an empty room,” Jean Baudrillard once wrote¹. “It is as if another planet is communicating with you.

From the very beginning of this recent obsession with identifying everyone online (yes, they like to call it "age" verification, but it always ends up as identity verification), we've been pointing out that it was a huge privacy nightmare waiting to happen. Or maybe it wasn't waiting. Maybe it was already happening. This week a...

There is no path out of our present crisis offered by the exaltation of callousness.