Anna Funder wrote Stasiland back in 2003—fourteen years after the fall of the Stasi and three years before the invention of Twitter. Of course, no prurient or censorious bureaucrat had intercepted Justine Sacco’s private thoughts. Justine had tweeted them herself, laboring under the misapprehension—the same one I labored under for a while—that Twitter was a safe place to tell the truth about yourself to strangers. That truth telling had really proven to be an idealistic experiment gone wrong.
