The Y2K affair, which overlapped with the dot-com era, reinforced that value. On the past several New Year’s Eves, Twitter users have exchanged sneers over an old Best Buy warning sticker placed on new computers sold in 1999. “Remember: Turn off your computer before midnight,” it read. The whole thing seems idiotic today. But in the years leading up to the Year 2000 Problem, thousands of software developers, many older ones recruited based on their days as COBOL programmers, worked to make sure that critical systems in almost every organization didn’t fail. If successful, none of their work would be seen or heard from again—which it wasn’t. Was Y2K a racket to boost the tech-consulting industry? Maybe, but not entirely. No matter the case, the way people responded to it—with serious planning, investment, and concern—couldn’t be more different from how people tend to think about global-technology issues today, including the way Facebook handled personal data on its platform. If it happened now, Y2K would be seen as an opportunity to discard the stupid chaff of the past, not to retrofit it for ongoing service and security.

All this work still takes place, of course. Your bank and electric company and airline all still have to get their internal systems working together with websites and apps. Old mainframes still have to be updated to work with new systems. But that kind of labor is not at the center of technological progress, esteem, aspiration, or wealth. Instead, old ways seek disruption and replacement through new approaches, in which the technology largely serves itself. Facebook and Google and Instagram and Uber and the like are big, complex offerings that require huge effort to build and keep running. But they are also organizations that strive to decouple from or reinvent the world rather than operating in collaboration with it. Facebook’s current scandal is a crisis of data trust and integrity. But more broadly, it is a crisis of provincialism. The company didn’t bother to evaluate how it might be used in the world, beyond its own expectations, and to design its systems accordingly, and defensively.

When old-timers lament the loss of the web of the 1990s and early 2000s, they often cite the openness, freedom, and individualism that internet’s decentralized infrastructure was supposed to bring to civic life. No gatekeepers! No middlemen! Anybody with a web server could become a captain of their chosen industry. Even Gates parroted this idea in his 1998 senate testimony, “The openness of the internet is inherent in its architecture.”

Those ideals were always gravely flawed, for the moment anyone can reach anyone else directly, danger, deceit, and exploitation are sure to follow. To some extent, that mistake led to Facebook’s current crisis, since an organization that only thinks it can do good just by “connecting people” can never imagine that its intentions might lead to harm.