When Chris first invited me for a chat one jacketless day in earliest spring, we wandered aimlessly across downtown Washington, paper coffee cups in hand. During those first weeks of his ownership, Chris had booked himself an endless listening tour. He seemed eager to speak with anyone who had worked at the magazine, or who might have a strong opinion about it. But as we talked, I wondered whether he wanted something more than my advice. I began to suspect that he wanted to rehire me as the New Republic’s editor. Before long he offered me the job, and I accepted.

In my experience, owners of the New Republic were older men who had already settled into their wealth and opinions. Chris was intriguingly different. He was 28, and his enthusiasm for learning made him seem even younger. During his honeymoon, he read War and Peace; the ottoman in his SoHo apartment was topped with seemingly every literary journal published in the English language. “When I first heard the New Republic was for sale,” he told me, “I went to the New York Public Library and began to read.” As he plowed through microfiche, the romance of the magazine’s history—and its storied writers, among them Rebecca West, Virginia Woolf, Edmund Wilson, Ralph Ellison, and James Wood—helped loosen his hold on his wallet.

Even after Facebook went public, leaving Chris with hundreds of millions of dollars in stock, he seemed indifferent to his wealth, or at least conflicted by it. He would get red-faced when people pointed out that he owned two estates and a spacious loft; he was apt to wear the same blazer every day. The source of his fortune didn’t define him—indeed, he always spoke of Facebook with an endearing detachment. He didn’t even use it that much, he once confessed to me at dinner. It was an admission that I found both disarming and hugely compelling. We soon began to remake the magazine, setting out to fulfill our own impossibly high expectations.

Over the past generation, journalism has been slowly swallowed. The ascendant media companies of our era don’t think of themselves as heirs to a great ink-stained tradition. Some like to compare themselves to technology firms. This redefinition isn’t just a bit of fashionable branding. As Silicon Valley has infiltrated the profession, journalism has come to unhealthily depend on the big tech companies, which now supply journalism with an enormous percentage of its audience—and, therefore, a big chunk of its revenue.

Dependence generates desperation—a mad, shameless chase to gain clicks through Facebook, a relentless effort to game Google’s algorithms. It leads media outlets to sign terrible deals that look like self-preserving necessities: granting Facebook the right to sell their advertising, or giving Google permission to publish articles directly on its fast-loading server. In the end, such arrangements simply allow Facebook and Google to hold these companies ever tighter.