We’re From the Internet
There are moments online that make you feel, briefly and absurdly, like you were right to waste so much of your life here. A few weeks ago I watched a single anonymous forum post about Angela Merkel snowball into a full public flashmob, and I laughed until something embarrassing happened to my face, and then I felt something that was almost pride. That’s the internet working exactly as intended.
This is what governments and traditional media keep failing to understand: it’s not a distribution channel. It’s a culture. People who grew up in forums, blogs, and comment sections don’t just use the internet to pass information—they use it to organize, to mock power, to build things that shouldn’t technically exist. Germany’s Pirate Party—an actual parliamentary political party that grew directly out of digital rights activism—became a real electoral force for a few years. Flashmobs with genuine political targets happened. Movements form in the time it takes a screenshot to travel between time zones.
The institutional response has been about as graceful as you’d expect: confused censorship attempts, laws drafted by people who clearly don’t use the tools they’re regulating, and a generalized anxiety that expresses itself as aggression. What you don’t understand, you attack. That reflex is as old as power itself—what’s new is that the people on the receiving end built the communications infrastructure and know how to use it.
What I feel is close to pride. Not in any specific movement or moment, but in the fact that the people who grew up weird and online—who were told they were wasting time, who built subcultures out of nothing—turned out to be building something that matters. The alternative is a world run entirely by people who’ve never had to think carefully about how information moves, and we’ve seen that version. It wasn’t good.
The nightmare scenario is also real: a future where the people who best understand these systems consolidate that understanding into a new kind of power. Techno-authoritarianism isn’t science fiction, it’s a current event. But that’s an argument for more people knowing how this works, not fewer. Step aside. We’re from the internet.