Yet our anonymity is also being threatened like never before. The surveillance state — once the provenance of the government — has expanded to include our favorite technology companies. Our phones beam our exact location coordinates to apps and advertisers every few seconds. All of our browsing behaviors, searches and consumption patterns are mined and monitored. In China, surveillance has become all encompassing; here in the United States, consumers retrofit our physical world with microphones and cameras and give them cute androgynous names. Under the guise of security, the widespread use of facial recognition technology could destroy the very notion of anonymity in public. Not even our biological makeup is safe from exposure as genetic testing threatens to jeopardize not only our privacy but also the privacy of our ancestors and relatives.

The scale and impact brought about by technology are confusing and troubling. Social media’s initial pitch offered the freedom for the anonymous to speak and for their words to have unprecedented reach. “The world is round, but the World Wide Web is flat,” I remember hearing tech executives say in the ancient days of … 2012. Dissidents rejoice!

But the internet is as good a tool to restrict speech — to flood the zone with so much low-quality information that the marketplace of ideas becomes a landfill where it’s impossible to separate the good from the garbage. This strategy, as state actors and garden-variety trolls showed in 2016, puts a strain on the democratic process. These virtual wars, fought by anonymous entities, are everywhere. It includes bots, juiced viewership metrics from click farms, counterfeit websites and videos posted by faceless pop-up scammers and manipulated public comment processes, at government organizations like the Federal Communications Commission, impersonating real Americans.

This fakery has a lasting, disorienting impact, as New York magazine’s Max Read described last year: “Everything that once seemed definitively and unquestionably real now seems slightly fake; everything that once seemed slightly fake now has the power and presence of the real.”

I felt this acutely after the unmasking of poor Pierre Delecto. Looking through Senator Romney’s tweets, I was struck by how much they looked like the dozens of anodyne mentions I get from faceless accounts every day online. Over time, platforms like Twitter conditions users to dismiss random mentions from pictureless users with a handful of followers. Now I wonder whether those angry anonymous comments I’d been wading through were cathartic outbursts from the secret accounts of frustrated lawmakers.