'There was something inevitable about Paddy Cosgrave of the Web Summit falling on his Twitter sword given his history of invective on the platform.' Photograph: Patricia de Melo Moreira/AFP via Getty Images When introducing his 1994 book Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century 1914-1991, renowned historian Eric Hobsbawm expressed concern that “the destruction of the past, or rather of the social mechanisms that link one’s contemporary experience to that of earlier generations is one of the most characteristic and eerie phenomena of the late twentieth century. Most young men and women at the century’s end grow up in a...