If humans lost something when most of us ceased to live our whole lives in small tribes, if American life is no longer organized around small towns with all that they offer their residents, at the very least we made these countervailing gains. And this freedom to be different things in different spaces was enhanced by the early internet. Every subculture had its chat rooms. Far-flung people with niche interests could find one another. And no one knew if you were a dog.

Today’s internet is different. One powerful illustration of the phenomenon is Facebook’s People You May Know feature, plumbed most thoughtfully by Kashmir Hill.

In reporting on it for Gizmodo, she found:

A man who years ago donated sperm to a couple, secretly, so they could have a child—only to have Facebook recommend the child as a person he should know. He still knows the couple but is not friends with them on Facebook.

A social worker whose client called her by her nickname on their second visit, because she’d shown up in his People You May Know, despite their not having exchanged contact information.

A woman whose father left her family when she was six years old—and saw his then-mistress suggested to her as a Facebook friend 40 years later.

An attorney who wrote: “I deleted Facebook after it recommended as PYMK a man who was defense counsel on one of my cases. We had only communicated through my work email, which is not connected to my Facebook, which convinced me Facebook was scanning my work email.”

For most Americans, no matter if they were raised online or have never used a computer, I could conjure a scenario where they would feel a loss from worlds colliding in a particular way they didn’t want. And at some point, technology started making that harder to avoid.

Julie Irwin Zimmerman: I failed the Covington Catholic test

In fact, I wonder whether ongoing debates about matters as varied as Facebook user-data practices, “the right to be forgotten,” National Security Agency data collection, and any number of public-shaming controversies are usefully considered under the umbrella framework of How is new technology affecting our ability to keep our various worlds from colliding when we don’t want them to, and what, if anything, should we do about that?

In edge cases, almost all Americans will see the implications for freedom, as with China’s push toward an Orwellian society of surveillance cameras, facial-recognition technology, machine learning, and a state-assigned score for every citizen to rate their merits.

Thornier cases will implicate norms and manners that evolve as a society adapts to relatively new modes of nonstate, noncoercive interaction.

For example: I’m sitting in a coffee shop as I write this. Imagine that a man sitting at a nearby table spilled his coffee, got a phone call just afterward, and simply left, so that staff had to clean up his mess, a scene that culminated in a haggard-looking barista drooping her shoulders in frustration. Was the call a true emergency? We don’t know. But if not, almost everyone would agree that the man behaved badly.