A social network everyone said they hated but no one could stop logging in to went public at a valuation of one-hundred-odd billion dollars, its grinning founder ringing the opening bell over video chat, a death knell for affordable rent in San Francisco.

Technology was gnawing into relationships, community, identity, the commons. Maybe nostalgia was just an instinctual response to the sense that materiality was disappearing from the world.

It seemed to me that whatever I had, that the men of Silicon Valley did not, was exactly what I had been trying to sublimate for the past four years. Working in tech had provided an escape from the side of my personality that was emotional, impractical, ambivalent, and inconvenient—the part of me that wanted to know everyone’s feelings, that wanted to be moved, that had no apparent market value.

Two hundred million people signed on to a microblogging platform that helped them feel close to celebrities and other strangers they’d loathe in real life. Artificial intelligence and virtual reality were coming into vogue, again. Self-driving cars were considered inevitable. Everything was moving to mobile. Everything was up in the cloud. The cloud was an unmarked data center in the middle of Texas or Cork or Bavaria, but nobody cared. Everyone trusted it anyway.