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cofounder of Apple, Steve Wozniak, said that Engelbart should be credited “for everything we have in the way computers work today.”
    The emergence of the personal computer and the Internet, with its vast democratizing power, were part of Engelbart’s vision. He died in July 2013, a few weeks after revelations by a man named Edward Snowden that the United States National Security Agency was collecting spectacular amounts of data.Writing in the
Atlantic,
Alexis C. Madrigal noted: “We find ourselves a part of a ‘war on terror’ that is being perpetually, secretly fought across the very network that Engelbart sought to build. Every interaction we have with an Internet service generates a ‘business record’ that can be seized by the NSA through a secretive process that does not require a warrant or an adversarial legal proceeding.”
    The business purposes of such data collection are apparent, if unsettling. But what need did governments have for it? Among Western democracies, the stated purpose was piecing together suggestive patterns that might reveal extremists plotting attacks like those carried out on September 11, 2001. The dystopic possibilities of such powers had, of course, been anticipated by George Orwell in
1984,
and by the visionary cyberpunk novelist William Gibson in
Neuromancer
. But fiction was not necessary to see what could be done: in 2010, its utility as an instrumentof surveillance and suppression had been realized in, among other places, Syria, Tunisia, Iran, and China.
    So, too, were its other properties: as the Diaspora guys were making plans for their project in 2010, the Arab Spring was stirring to life, some of it in subversive online communications that either were not noticed or not taken seriously by the regimes that would soon be toppled. The same mechanisms allowed more alert regimes to surveil opponents, or to be led directly to the hiding places of dissidents who had unwittingly emitted location beams from phones in their pockets.
    By 2010, in just the two years since Raphael Sofaer had entered college, Facebook had grown by 300 million users, almost five new accounts every second of the day. The ravenous hunger for new ways to connect in a sprawling world was not invented by Facebook, but the company was perfectly positioned to meet it, thanks to skill, luck, and the iron will of its young founder, Mark Zuckerberg.A manager in Facebook’s growth department, Andy Johns, described going to lunch for the first time with his new boss, one of Zuckerberg’s lieutenants.
    â€œI remember asking him, ‘So what kind of users am I going after? Any particular demographics or regions? Does it matter?’ and he sternly responded ‘It’s fucking land-grab time, so get all of the fucking land you can get.’”
    Could four young would-be hackers build an alternative that preserved the rich layers of connection in social networking without collecting the tolls assessed by Facebook? Would anyone support their cause?
    When word got out about their project, they were swamped.
    In a matter of days, they received donations from thousands of people in eighteen countries; tens of thousands more started to follow their progress on Twitter, and in time, a half million people signed up to get an invitation. That was more weight than the four were ready to carry. On the night that their fund-raising drive exploded, as money was pouring in through online pledges, nineteen-year-old Rafi Sofaer toppled off the even keel where he seemed to live his life. It was too much. They were just trying to build some software. “Make them turn it off!” he implored the others. It couldn’t be done.
    Four guys hanging around a little club room at NYU suddenly found themselves handed a global commission to rebottle the genie of personalprivacy. They were the faces of a movement, a revolution against the settled digital order. Their job was to demonetize the