Want to Fix Social Media? Lose the Anonymity.

In Victor Hugo’s Notre-Dame de Paris (later more popularly known as The Hunchback of Notre Dame), Archbishop Claude Frollo offers a critique of modern technology, the printing press.

As Dom Claude points at the majestic towers of the cathedral with his left hand, he points at a printed book with his right. “Alas,” he said, “this will kill that.”

“It was a presentiment that human thought, in changing its form, was about to change its mode of expression; that the dominant idea of each generation would no longer be written with the same matter, and in the same manner,” Hugo wrote.

Hugo might as well have had his fictional priest pointing at both a cell phone and the U.S. Capitol.