New Delhi, Dec. 17 -- Denmark has cancelled Christmas-or Christmas cards at any rate. From the end of this month, the nation's postal service will no longer carry letters. The announcement from the land that Shakespeare immortalized in Hamlet has delivered a metaphorical deathblow to one of the world's oldest forms of communication, one that is headed for extinction.

December is shaping up as that kind of month. Warnings about digital media and its barons are coming in thick and fast. Earlier this month, the widely followed Nobel laureate economist Paul Krugman labelled the US "a digital narco-state" in a searing Substack post.

Last week, Edward Luce, a columnist of the Financial Times, derided the alarmingly pessimistic worldview of a ...