As a teenager growing up in the suburbs of Washington, I ritually watched the Sunday-morning political talk shows with my family. We parsed and argued and jeered at the screen as national figures delivered careful, poll-tested talking points.

Right after college, after growing up in the United States, I moved to India, broadly telling the story of how an old and stagnant country was suddenly waking up. And I came home, back to America, in 2009 after telling that story and writing a book about that.

For our family, learning was everything. Homework came first; books, being sacred, were never to be left on the floor.

To have come of age during and after the global financial crisis of 2008 is to belong to a generation often unable to do what an American could once expect, and to do what was once expected: Get a job, pay off student loans, and find a place of your own.

Human beings are human beings. They say what they want, don't they? They used to say it across the fence while they were hanging wash. Now they just say it on the Internet.

Disclosure and transparency are the currency of the Internet, and they are at odds with authoritarianism.

Do you remember the first three years of Steam? People absolutely hated that Valve forced you to launch their game through what some people called a virus at the time, which was the Steam client. But Steam led the digital distribution revolution: it was the first across all platforms.

I worry about my grandchildren because the Internet can be brutal.