Just now I was making a post elsewhere about my having experienced a particular online social evolution pattern "since I was on the ARPANET". Along with my longstanding computer geekery, I'm a huge Tolkien fan, and it struck me that being a developer who used the ARPANET is equivalent to being an elf who lived under the light of the Two Trees in Valinor. In the late Third Age of Middle Earth, or in the 2020s, we are rare, wise, and immensely powerful. 