You're sitting at home alone and there's a knock on the front door.

When you open it, there's a man standing there.

And the man says to you, I think we both know why I'm here.

We know what you did. Let's go.

My friend Jamie always talks about this hypothetical.

He swears that Errol Morris came up with it.

I don't know, it's not on Google.

But the point is most of us, if we get that knock on the door, we'll confess to

something because most of us have done a bad thing and we've gotten away with it.

And we're looking over our shoulder until the day we finally get caught.

This guy Ethan Zuckerman had a secret like that.

But his is bigger than most of ours.

When he was young, he accidentally did something that made the world and

specifically the internet, a lot worse.

And most of us today are living in that broken world that he helps create.

From Gimlet, I'm PJ Vote and you're listening to Reply All to show about the internet.

Before Ethan Zuckerman screwed everything up, he was a grad student in a small town in Massachusetts.

This was 1994 and Ethan was working at a company called tripod.com.

Prior to reporting the story, I thought that tripod.com was one of those websites that

everybody had heard of.

It turns out that's not true.

Tons of people haven't. So we thought we'd do a quick refresher just in case.

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