I’ve started appreciating traditional business-customer relationships more than ever. I enjoy paying for things because it’s an explicit business transaction. There’s nothing phony about it.

Apple doesn’t give me an iPad because they want to be friends with me. They give me an iPad because I pay them for an iPad. My accountant doesn’t do my taxes because he’s a philanthropist. I pay him to do my taxes.

With money, comes accountability to the customer. If my iPad stops working, Apple has to answer to me. If my tax return has errors, my accountant will be answering questions.

No one is answering my questions at Google, Facebook, et al. Why would they? They have customers to attend to, and I’m not one of them.

The looking glass was now a mirror; instead of reinventing us, the web simply provided more of us to the world, and more ways to take advantage of the world around us. We speak of Yelping and checking in on 4Square as if these were activities, when they are simply the day-to-day cataloguing of our lives—or, even worse, a grimly detached version of modern life in which we aspire to be ourselves. Mediation presents itself as a friendly tool when in fact it creates distance between us and the ordinary.

An excess of candor remains a problem—the digital equivalent of a nip-slip or drunken voicemail—yet these cases are more accidental than confessional. Secret identities and alternate lives have been ferreted out, turned into a professional liability. When they persist, they are (hopefully temporary) refuges created out of need—like the online homes made by teens who don’t fit in in their real-life homes. These internet lives are real life by proxy, not a shadowy, distorted version that is never intended to be realized.