Then we hit a snag. Suddenly, there was too much information. Too many notifications made us want to check them less. Too many social interactions made us want to post online less frequently. Too many emails made us not want to answer. We were, effectively, DDoSing one another: the term for a distributed denial-of-service attack, in which malicious actors overwhelm their target by flooding it with traffic, leaving the victim incapacitated. Our online public lives became too much to handle, causing many of us to shrink back into our private spheres.
