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A few years ago, during an interview with Twitter’s C.E.O., Jack Dorsey, something broke in my brain. I was in San Francisco to grill him on a number of thorny issues about online harassment and content moderation. His answers, while aspirational, clarified very little and seemed to require blind good faith to accept.

As he spoke to me about the inevitable changes and evolution of the company that would, someday, lead to a platform full of healthy, productive conversations, I found my mind wandering. What if instead of relying on the inevitable march of progress, Dorsey and Twitter cut their losses and closed up shop (Ashley Feinberg, far braver than me, actually asked Dorsey this point-blank in a subsequent interview)? Would we be better off?

I’d been covering technology for a decade, and during the course of the interview I began to see Silicon Valley’s problems as far more existential than I’d thought. My model had shifted from “How we can coexist with these platforms in a healthy way?” to “Should we should exist with them at all?”

This same question has been bouncing around my head throughout our Privacy Project. Since technology companies insidiously frame digital privacy as a trade-off, there’s an implication that we must sacrifice something precious to gain something precious. We take this as a given — the cost of doing business. The price of technological progress. But there’s no reason it has to be this way. Which brings me to two wonderful pieces I read this week.