Illustration by Matt Daley

Are we too apathetic when it comes to social media user experiments?

A few months ago, Facebook got into trouble for experimenting with some of their users. In the name of “science,” the company decided to start tweaking people’s newsfeeds with an excess of either positive or negative status updates from friends. The study showed that exposure to these updates could make people more positive or negative themselves. In short, Facebook made some people sad. On purpose.

Shortly after Facebook published its study, the dating site OK Cupid admitted that it, too, was screwing with its users. The company told people who weren’t matches that they were perfectly compatible. It removed photos from profiles. It tracked conversations between people. Its motive was simple: to see what would happen and maybe improve its own matching algorithm.

Both of these experiments were wildly fascinating. They were also wholly unethical. Neither company had anything even close to informed consent from the people they toyed with. These sites treated their users like guinea pigs, which is weird because I’m not entirely sure it’s even legal to treat guinea pigs like guinea pigs anymore.

The response to these experiments was strange. Some people were outraged, obviously. But most either didn’t notice or didn’t care. Facebook—a site with more than a billion active users—decided to screw with random people’s emotions and the general response was an overwhelming “Meh.” Data collection is bland and uninteresting.

Maybe we just aren’t surprised when this stuff happens anymore. If you use the Internet, you’re experimented on. It isn’t new. In the early 2000s, I worked for a digital agency and one of our clients was a large retail website. For about six weeks, we showed half the site’s visitors yellow “buy” buttons, while the other half saw shiny new green buttons. The green ones showed a marginally higher click rate, which, extrapolated over a year, meant about $50 million. So all the buttons turned green. This is basic A/B testing—an exercise in using data to determine and influence behaviour.

By today’s standard, that kind of experiment is quaint. In the last decade, the Internet has become exceedingly good at tracking and manipulating people. Amazon uses browsing and purchase history to flog products, Google “scans” (but doesn’t “read”) email to try targeting ads, and pretty much every website you visit weighs and measures the actions you take for their own gain. As far as the Internet is concerned, you are the sum total of your clicks, likes and purchases. You are a data profile they can apply an algorithm to and nothing more.

It’s not the worst deal. You get a worldwide network of infinite information and constant communication; they get to sell you stuff. As far as Faustian pacts go, that seems sort of fair. But how far does it go? We get upset when a government starts peeking at our data, but we willingly hand it over to Facebook, Amazon, and Apple and, well, everyone else, assuming that the “Terms of Service” we didn’t actually read are reasonable. (It’s worth noting that Facebook inserted the clause saying they could experiment on you only after their emotion experiment had been conducted, but before they told anyone about it.)

I’m not bringing this up to fear-monger about the evils of modern technology. I like technology, I use Facebook and I shop with Amazon. And I understand that sometimes it brings on big sweeping cultural shifts. But we’re on the cusp of owning Apple Watches that can send our heartbeat to our spouse. Or, theoretically, Facebook. Or a doctor. Or an insurance company. Given where technology is headed, it’s not too much to ask that the companies handling our data be honest about what exactly they’re doing with it (or that we bother to pay attention).

Dave Eggers’ 2013 novel, The Circle, examined people willfully (even gleefully) handing over their information, their privacy and, ultimately, their humanity. People who didn’t like the book criticized that Eggers doesn’t understand technology; that he just doesn’t get it. After seeing the the crowd at Apple’s iPhone and Watch announcement react with almost religious fervour, though, I’m convinced saying Eggers doesn’t understand technology is a lot like reading 1984 and saying George Orwell doesn’t understand government.

Facebook announced the changes on its diversity page, and said that it had been working closely with its “network of support, a group of leading LGBT advocacy organizations” to ensure that everyone was properly represented in the Facebook cyber world.

Not only can users choose their gender, but they can also choose how Facebook addresses them by deciding which pronoun is used in conjunction with them: him, her, or they. In many ways, the move is ground-breaking. By allowing anyone to express their own gender, whatever that gender may be, Facebook is recognizing some of it users who are most marginalized in the mainstream.

Irene Miller, the president of Toronto Parents, Families and Friends of Lesbians and Gays (PFLAG) told the Toronto Sun: “This will help (youth) feel more confident within themselves and let everyone that they’re in contact with be comfortable in how they address them.”

And while this won’t affect everybody’s Facebook experience,  as Facebook software engineer Brielle Harrison told the Associated Press: “There’s going to be a lot of people for whom this is going to mean nothing, but for the few it does impact, it means the world.”

Still, while this is all good news it’s important to remember that this change by Facebook comes at a time in Canada where gender identity or expression is not included in the Canadian Human Rights. Bill C-279, which aims to “amend the Canadian Human Rights Act to include gender identity as a prohibited ground of discrimination” is still in consideration before the Canadian Senate.

“We show that easily accessible digital records of behavior, Facebook Likes, can be used to automatically and accurately predict a range of highly sensitive personal attributes including: sexual orientation, ethnicity, religious and political views, personality traits, intelligence, happiness, use of addictive substances, parental separation, age, and gender.”

Here are some of the findings: If you like “Being Conservative” and “The Bible,” you are “Satisfied with life”; if you like “Gorillaz” and “Science” you are “Unsatisfied with life”; and liking “Not Being Pregnant” and  “The L Word” means you are “A homosexual woman.”

As always, there was a furor over what looks like another Facebook privacy violation. Chain messages warning friends to tighten up their privacy settings yet again circulated the web.

Others embraced the study with a fun, interactive app—The One Click Personality Test. “It looks at the things you Like on Facebook, and then tells you who you are. Because you are what you like.”

But what do the results really mean? Basically, marketers now have another resource for targeting consumers, and anyone who wants to can use the results to make inferences about your personal life (as if they weren’t doing that already).

Most of these results are pretty obvious anyway. For example, if you ‘Like’ Jesus Christ that means you’re a Christian; if you ‘Like’ Belvedere Vodka that means you drink alcohol. Other results are plain weird, like if you ‘Like’ Curly Fries you likely have a high IQ.

My concern isn’t that this tool will be used to profile or “out” people. What gets me is that the study was done in the first place. This is a scientific study conducted by Cambridge University. Is this really what science (at least the stuff we’re exposed to) is reduced to? A marketing tool? Meanwhile in Canada, researchers battle to get funding for real science only to be muzzled when their results don’t jibe with the federal government’s agenda.

As of February 1 this year, Harper tightened up the privacy settings on science research. Now, any research associated with the DFO (Department of Fisheries and Oceans) is vetted by the government before it’s submitted to a scientific journal. The government also controls who scientists give interviews to and what kind of questions they can answer.

When journalist, Michael Harris, called bull-shit on Harper, the government simply lied about what’s been going on. The DFO posted on its website, “The iPolitics story by Michael Harris published on February 7th, 2013 is untrue. There have been no changes to the Department’s publication policy.”

An unnamed DFO scientist responded by posting an e-mail from Michelle Wheatley, the Central and Arctic science director, which outlined changes to the publication policy. The scientist ended the post, “You decide who’s being untruthful.”

It’s embarrassing, really. Scientists from the United States say they won’t work with the DFO because they refuse to be muzzled. And in the Canadian arctic we’re neglecting the world’s prime location for studying climate change, leaving scientists in Sweden and Germany – confused and annoyed –to pick up our slack.

So great, we know what our ‘Likes’ tell us about our behaviours, but what do our behaviours tell us about climate change in the arctic, or the state of salmon aquaculture operations. Maybe it’s not a lack of privacy that’s the problem, but too much of it.

Illustration by Matt Daley

Recently, Google ruined my life. I may be exaggerating slightly, given that all they did was redesign and tweak Google Reader, one of their many services that I use daily and for which I pay nothing. But Reader, an admittedly niche product that lets you read articles from many websites in one place, has become my online home. It is the thing that organizes and makes sense of the sprawling, incoherent mass of the internet and collects it on one familiar light-blue page.

So when Google swooped in and changed things, I felt as if someone had rearranged all my furniture like some undergraduate prank. Making matters worse, the ability to share things with other Reader users was now gone—sacrificed to the company’s need to push their new social network, Google+. Not only had they redecorated the place, they had gone and redone all the wiring, too—and I was stranded in this newly alien environment that used to seem like home.

There were, however, those who had the tools and wherewithal to respond. People—people far more tech-savvy than me—used a browser plug-in called Greasemonkey to write pieces of code that magically restored the old Google Reader to me. Greasemonkey, as its auto mechanic-derived name suggests, lets you pop open the hood of your web browser and mess around, and there’s almost no end to what you can do with it.

It isn’t something just anyone can pick up, however. In order to create your own personalized experience of the web, you need to know how to code or, at the very least, wait for someone else to do it for you. And that requirement highlights a simple fact about the online world: if you aren’t literate in the languages of digital technology, your capacity to control your own experience is constrained. From the latest outrageous Facebook redesign that millions of people freak out over, to subtle tweaks to the ways in which Twitter operates, many of us—even those like me who really care about this stuff—find ourselves powerless to suit the web to our own needs.

It’s a problem that will require immensely complex solutions, primarily in how we conceive of education. If today we teach kids language and rhetoric so that one day they might pick apart politician’s speeches or learn to recognize a scam (and let’s face it, we’re not even doing that very well) we may soon have to do something analogous for programming skills. Much as “freedom of the press” was only ever true for those who owned one, protecting our freedoms online is going to require millions more people to better understand just how it works. Even those “digital natives” you hear about—the terrifying Tweeting, texting tweens—seldom have even the foggiest idea of how their favourite websites work. They can update their Facebook status without breaking stride, but could they code even a rudimentary equivalent? Vanishingly few could.

Thankfully, in the meantime there are intermediate bits of software that simplify and automate some aspects of coding so that those of us who can’t tell JavaScript from HTML can still control our digital lives in novel, unexpected ways. Take new service ifttt.com, for example. An acronym for “if this, then that”, ifttt allows you to cobble together dozens of commonly used web services to suit your own needs. Perhaps you want to know when a friend has posted a new picture on Flickr. Hook it up to ifttt and it can send you an email, a text message, even a phone call alerting you that your friend has uploaded their latest cat photo.

It isn’t quite idiot-proof. Yet it’s also a far cry from Greasemonkey and other programming-based tools because it asks you to think in terms you already know, rather than sophisticated new ones you must learn. And in a sense, this is the strange paradox of access and control on the web. On one hand, you are subject to the companies who become the default ways of connecting online, making you subject to their interests. On the other, the freer, less corporate versions of the web offer you tools to tweak how you use those services and to what end. It is—until coding literacy becomes the norm—almost akin to economics of the 1920s or the 2000s: with the tools of power centralized among a tiny few, the public is left at the mercy of those in control.

To get a sense of what is at stake, though, one need only turn to the ambivalent story of Diaspora*. In 2010, a four-person team of young programmers from New York University’s Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences set out to build an alternative to Facebook that would address privacy worries and protect user data. Their announcement hit, however, amidst heightened concerns over Facebook’s record on privacy, and the team was thrown into a harsh spotlight, especially after a fundraising campaign suddenly netted them $200,000. Their plan was to create a Facebook with none of the drawbacks of Facebook, a task even Google can’t manage to do. Tragically, in late 2011 one of the four founders, 22 year-old Ilya Zhitomirskiy, was found dead, apparently after committing suicide.

No one knows, of course, if the pressure of trying to build an alternative to an all-powerful website contributed to Zhitomirskiy’s decision to take his life. But it’s an unsettling symbol of something—of how difficult it is for even young, brilliant programmers to take control of their and our online experience from multi-billion dollar entities. And, if truth be told, a redesign of a website is but a minor inconvenience. But the capacity of web firms to “rewire” whole swathes of our day-to-day lives is nonetheless ominous. It’s also a sign that, in future, freeing oneself from their grasp will come from seizing their tools and methods as our own, and learning how to code.

David Skok. Illustration by Dave Donald

David Skok, the managing editor of GlobalNews.ca, checked into Harvard University in September to begin a one-year Nieman Fellowship. The 33-year-old is the first Canadian digital journalist to receive the prestigious award. He’ll be studying “how to sustain Canadian journalism’s distinct presence in a world of stateless news organizations.” He spoke with This two weeks before heading to Boston.

THIS: I’ve seen you referred to as an online journalist and a digital journalist. Which do you prefer?

SKOK: Digital journalist. Online is a little too specific to the web. What we do is beyond that. It’s mobile. It’s iPads and everything else.

THIS: Do you like being called a digital journalist?

SKOK: It’s fine for now but I look forward to the day when there’s no label that separates digital versus broadcast versus a print journalist.

THIS: Do you think the established media consider digital to be less important than traditional media?

SKOK: It depends on what we’re talking about. There are two ways to look at digital media. For me there’s the newsgathering … and then there’s digital media for publishing and distribution. I think digital media [for the latter] is becoming more accepted, if not by choice but by necessity. From a newsgathering point of view, I think there’s a long way to go.

THIS: For example?

SKOK: Look at the Arab Spring and how Andy Carvin of NPR used Twitter to verify information and facts. And he did the same thing with Syria. He was in Washington, DC. He’s being more effective at getting the accurate, fair, correct news out than the mainstream or legacy news organizations. That’s something I don’t think many news organizations have actually caught on to yet. And if they have it’s in a very tokenistic way, not as a real way of telling stories.

THIS: There’s a concern that if someone Tweets something, how do you know it’s true?

SKOK: Exactly. When I speak within my own newsrooms, I often make the point: how is a Tweet any different than a press release, or a report you’re hearing on a police scanner or anything else? Every piece of information we get needs to be verified and Twitter is no different.

THIS: Can you sum up your overriding goal for your fellowship?

SKOK: It’s probably too far-reaching but there are three parts I really want to look at. The first is the new tools of journalism, such as Twitter, open data, data journalism and even things like WikiLeaks. Second is how should Canadian newsrooms evolve in light of all these changes. This one hits me very close to home because I run a digital media organization within a legacy news organization. We created that from scratch and eventually, ultimately we have to integrate our product and our journalists into the main news organization as a whole. The third part is how can we, as Canadian news organizations, think of our role in the global sphere.

THIS: What do you mean by stateless news organizations?

SKOK: Ones that are based in a country but whose target audience is not that country. Al Jazeera, for example. Its target audience is not Qatar, where it’s based or Dubai or even the Arab world. I watched Al Jazeera and BBC World and CNN International on my iPad during the Arab Spring demonstrations. I didn’t need to be watching a Canadian news organization. Do we even need a national news organization anymore?

THIS: What else will you be studying?

SKOK: I’m noticing, as someone running the digital side of things, that we’re increasingly reliant on private enterprise to host the content. For example Facebook, Twitter, even the servers we use, Amazon, let’s say, they’re all private companies that host content in California. What interest do they have in sustaining Canadian journalism? What obligations does the CRTC place on them? There’s something about that we should be questioning. I’ll also be taking some courses at business school to understand more of the business side of things. As journalists we’ve always had this church and state mentality and I don’t know if we can still afford to do that anymore because we’re not making money anymore.

THIS: Are you excited about spending a year at Harvard?

SKOK: Absolutely. The resources at Harvard are immense. There are so many bright people. But not just that, there are programs that are thinking about all these issues we’re talking about, whether the law school, the Kennedy School, MIT. And they’re tackling these issues every day. To be immersed in that environment and be able to tackle them without the day-to-day operational running of a newsroom is incredibly exciting.

A suspect wanted for questioning by Vancouver police following the June 2011 riot that erupted after the Vancouver Canucks lost the Stanley Cup playoffs. The law is still grappling with how to track crime in the age of social media and ubiquitous cell phone cameras. Image courtesy Vancouver Police.

After the sheer surprise of Vancouver’s Stanley Cup riots had dissipated, Canadian commentators tried to figure out what it all meant. Most beat their usual political drums—months later we’re blaming the pinko anarchists, capitalist pigs, and beer companies for making their products so darn tasty and portable.

But this being 2011, many who broke windows with one hand held camera phones in the other. And as myriad pictures and videos of the event began to circulate, another worrying spectre emerged: social-media vigilantism. Images of those involved in violence and property damage spread quickly around the Web, often with the explicit intention of shaming, catching, and even punishing the perpetrators with acts of “citizen justice.”

“We have seen Big Brother and he is us,” portentously intoned social-media expert Alexandra Samuel to the Globe and Mail. And really, who could blame her? Anyone who has ever taken public transit or gone to a movie knows our fellow Canadians can’t always be counted on to be fair, or even terribly nice. But if our mistakes and trespasses used to be judged by the mostly neutral bodies of the State, this new technology means we now run the risk of being tried and even convicted by the body politic.

This speaks to a phenomenon increasingly difficult to ignore, as centuries-long practices of law and social norms, whether privacy, ownership, knowledge, or even statecraft, are threatened by new technologies. These are worrying prospects to be sure, partly because they’re just so new. But here’s a radical idea: rather than throwing up our hands, or simply calling for the use of less technology, we need to spend time thinking about how we will reshape our legal and social institutions to deal with the inevitable change that is on its way. To protect the relative freedoms of liberal society, we need to build policing of technology right into our legal structures.

After all, it’s not as if what we’re experiencing now doesn’t have some precedent. Take the telephone, for example. Though it was an incredible leap forward in communication, it also presented the rather sticky problem that your communication could be recorded and put to unintended ends. Similarly, having a point of communication in your home meant that people could contact you at any time, whether you happened to be eating dinner or not.

Our legal structures responded by enforcing laws about the conditions under which telephone calls could be made, recorded, and submitted for evidence in a legal trial. Maybe just as importantly, we also developed social strictures around the phone, including general rules about appropriate times for calling and the right way to answer. Like most social norms, some people follow them and some don’t, but at least legally speaking, our rules around the telephone generally seem to work.

What we need, then, is a similarly measured response that institutes civic and legal codes for how surveillance technology can be used, whether that is encouraging social sanction for inappropriate use, or articulating under what circumstances public footage can be submitted for legal evidence. In the same vein, it would also mean the legal system has to deal with the dissemination of information for vigilante purposes, and ratchet up consequences for those who take the law into their own hands. It would involve the tricky process of the law considering intent and context, but given the different degrees in murder charges and Canada’s hate-crime laws, that kind of legal subtlety seems to make our system better, not worse.

Implementing these changes will take decades, not years, because the changes here are huge, involving how the State exercises its authority, but also how we as members of a society relate to one another. Yet the purpose of the legal system has always been to police out those two aspects of our lives. And rather than only decrying the downsides of mob mentality, the unfettered exchange of private information or the Web’s detrimental impact on established business, we need to think about preserving the good in this new technology.

Because there’s another worry looming here too, and it also is about historical precedent. In the 19th century, the rise of printing technologies and cheap reading materials drastically altered how ideas were spread. The State responded by instituting literary study into the then-new school curriculum so that the young might “learn to read properly.” Certainly, there were upsides: national cohesion, shared values, and proscriptions against anti-social behaviour. But it also meant that the radical element was contained and made safe, as youth were taught to think usefully, not dangerously.

We sit at the cusp of a similar moment in the history of information, and it’s certainly true that it occasionally feels like a riot— out of control and of our very basest nature. The fitting response, then, is much like the delicate dance of riot-policing done right: a reaction that enforces some order on chaos, while still protecting the rights and privileges such acts are meant to restore.

The Canadian Society of Magazine Editors held their annual Editors’ Choice Awards last night in Toronto, and for the second year in a row, This was named “Magazine of the Year” in the small circulation category.

Many, many people work very hard to make This happen, so it would be impossible to thank by name all the writers, editors, designers, photographers, illustrators, and researchers who put so much work into each issue. Thank you all so much.

A few particular thanks are definitely necessary. Our volunteer section editors who worked on the magazine in 2010 are a huge part of our success, so thanks to: Chantal Braganza, Lindsay Kneteman, Aaron Leaf, Lauren McKeon, Stuart Ross, Eva Salinas, Nick Taylor-Vaisey, Daniel Tencer, and Ivor Tossell. David Donald, our art director, makes us look champagne-good on a juice-box-budget. Lisa Whittington-Hill, our publisher, runs this whole miraculous show and manages the business of running a small magazine — no easy feat in Canada these days. Thank you also to the board of directors of our umbrella organization, the Red Maple Foundation, whose guidance and expertise has sustained This for 45 years now.

Finally, our thanks to you—our readers and supporters. Our mandate is to tell the stories that are going untold in big corporate media and break new talent, and your attention and engagement and interest is the only reason we exist. Awards are swell, but we do it for you, and your support means everything to This.

If you’re not a subscriber already, we’d like to encourage you to consider it. We’ll continue posting all our articles on the website for free, but a mission like ours needs financial support as well. At $27.99 for six issues mailed straight to your door, buying a subscription is easier and cheaper for you; subscriptions provide us with stable, predictable, and sustainable funding to support the magazine’s mandate. It’s win-win. You can also make a tax-deductible donation to the foundation to support our work.

Finally, telling your friends about This is a great — and free! — way to spread the word and help us reach more people. We don’t have big marketing budgets or advertising campaigns; word of mouth is how most people learn about us. So share a This story on Facebook or Twitter when you like it — just being out there and part of Canada’s public discussion is important to the magazine and our future. Thanks for reading.

“People spend an average of 14 minutes a day on Facebook,” says Vancouver-based Haas Lyons, a 33-year-old public engagement consultant who sees an opportunity to steer Canadians toward more political conversations in that space. “We can start to really advance civic capacity to be taking leadership on pressing issues.” During a six-year stint with America Speaks in Washington, D.C., Haas Lyons helped integrate social media into the massive nonprofit’s citizen engagement initiatives, such as following up on Hurricane Katrina relief programs and grappling with how to bring jobs back to Ohio’s Rust Belt. But, she is quick to add, the goal is “never to replace face-to-face conversation, but to augment face-to-face conversation.”

Her current focus is the Alberta Climate Dialogue, a citizen-participation initiative that brings together individuals, businesses, and NGOs to help Alberta municipalities mitigate and adapt to climate change. After five years, the group wants to be able to share its views and experiences with the provincial government in an effort to change the political conversation on the always-heated topic. The tools and technologies may be new, but it comes down to a core belief that will be very familiar to activists of earlier generations: the personal is political.

“My hope is that in each of these individual democratic engagement pieces, we’re building civic capacity to have hard conversations,” Haas Lyons says. But she also knows there are challenges ahead for activists in social media. “People go on Facebook to look at photos and watch funny videos. We have to make it relevant, not just available.”

Illustration by Matt Daley

The United States’ decision to invade Afghanistan soon after 9/11 was misguided for many reasons, but one was purely practical: Al Qaeda is a stateless, decentralized network scattered across the globe. The spectral, international scope of the problem was no secret—so why wage a conventional war on one country? It was as if an outmoded way of thinking simply couldn’t react fast enough to a startling new reality.

With the rise of WikiLeaks and its release of thousands of classified military and diplomatic documents, something disturbingly similar is happening again. While the internet and geopolitical struggle were once rarely connected, in the WikiLeaks affair, they are now intertwined in a very real way. Among other things, the cables detailed secret U.S. bombings of Yemen and Chinese cyber-attacks on Google. Their publication drew loud, if somewhat hollow, condemnations from the likes of Hillary Clinton.

Unfortunately, the U.S. response to WikiLeaks seems eerily analogous to its response to 9/11. Another stateless, decentralized network has again attacked the establishments of American power. And America’s response, again, has been an ineffectual, ham-fisted blunder that mostly harms bystanders while the perpetrators vanish into the hills. Worse, corporations are also lining up behind governments to help protect the political status quo.

When WikiLeaks released the first batch of diplomatic cables, the reaction was, unsurprisingly, split. But whether people thought it good or bad, what everyone saw was that the spread of information on networks that do not adhere to traditional ideas of centralization, statehood, or journalism made that information extremely difficult to hide.

That didn’t stop the American government and companies from twisting almost every arm they could grab to try and stem the flow. Amazon, whose servers WikiLeaks were using to hold a copy of the cables, shut down WikiLeaks’ account, in part because its terms of service said its customers must own the rights to documents they publish. (Nobody at Amazon, it seems, caught the irony that the entire point of leaked documents is that you don’t ask for permission to publish them.) When the U.S Department of Justice served Twitter with a subpoena for the accounts of people associated with WikiLeaks—including WikiLeaks head Julian Assange and Icelandic MP Birgitta Jónsdóttir—Twitter had little choice but to comply.

Corporations obviously have to abide by the law. Beyond the business ramifications of legal censure, if they don’t play nice, neither other companies nor their shareholders will trust them.

Even though under most circumstances, law works to keep societies and economies running smoothly, legal protections for expressing dissent are built into truly democratic systems. If you want to demonstrate against powers that affect your life, you can always protest in a public square or on the street in front of a multinational. You are safe doing so because that space belongs to you as a citizen. But unlike a leak in the traditional press or the careful dance between protesters and police at a rally, WikiLeaks highlighted the fact that, on the internet, there is no tradition of public space. Indeed, the stark reality is that virtual world is essentially a private, corporate one.

If technology is increasingly both a tool and a site of resistance—and it unquestionably is—then the ownership of that space is of crucial importance. Centuries of common law underpin our rights to expression in public places; the internet has no equivalent.

We often treat the web like a public space, but the reality is that it is more like a private amusement park. We, the children who have been granted access, must play by the rules posted at its entrance. From the great server farms where data is stored to the pipes running under the sea to the copper wires linking your home to the web, all of it is owned by profit-seeking companies. And when the law knocks on their door—as it does every day with Twitter, Amazon, Google, Facebook, and others—they have to comply. What WikiLeaks so clearly demonstrated is that when companies beholden to the status quo own the virtual ground on which you can resist, it might be pulled from under you without recourse.

None of this succeeded in top-killing the WikiLeaks gusher, of course. The centreless nature of the web ensured that (so did legal protections in Europe).

But it did demonstrate that the authoritarian impulse is alive and well online, and that the rules of dissent, misbehaviour, and resistance are even less settled on the web than they are in the streets. The networks through which we spread information do not belong to us as citizens—only as consumers. Like any business transaction, the use of Twitter or storage on Amazon servers operates under a contract limited by the law. Anything that actually defies legality—as did the suffragettes, the civil rights movement, or anticapitalist anarchism today—is off limits.

Significant historical change often means not following the rules: taking to the streets, gathering with others, and yes, even breaking the odd window. But when the new virtual space of public assembly is owned by those with a vested interest in not rocking the boat, expressing dissent becomes more and more difficult.

So we are left with two competing, incompatible visions: of a technology that promised to upend the status quo; and a set of rules designed to ensure we never dare to try.