Increasingly, I find myself processing each passing year not as a string of events but as a series of shifting moods. Instead of discrete milestones, I recall sensations: an intense rush of ecstasy, late-afternoon shock, a week of fatigue, a season of contented bliss. This year, the moods I remember with an unusual fondness — the ones that offered a reprieve from the rest of life, on and offline — were brought on by strangers playing music on the Internet.40

In 2014, we saw things w...