A swell in reactionary shuffling online caught my eye this week. I’m no stranger to the art of tearing things down. Back in college, I’d regularly take this very site offline, replacing it with the deliberately cryptic—an unexplained song lyric, an angsty declaration, a message so encoded even I couldn’t decipher it now. These digital retreats usually followed a moment of overexposure: I’d shared too much, felt too visible, or gotten entangled in some online skirmish. Running away f...
