I know that you’re cold, calculating, and goal-driven by nature, so I’ll get straight to the point: We need to talk about your manners—or rather, the fact that you don’t seem to have any. I know you’re made up of computer code, so it’s understandable you’d favour logic and efficiency over any degree of social decorum. But it’s time you learned some etiquette. Because, as I’m sure the more than 3.5 billion internet users worldwide would agree, you’re rude as hell.

Let’s start with your lack of boundaries. You’re like a set of overzealous sales employees, if those employees could stalk me onto the metro and yell at me about deals on MeUndies while I’m trying to mindlessly scroll through Twitter. If Rockwell was already singing, “I always feel like somebody’s watching me” back in 1984, I’d hate to know how the poor guy feels today. Because he’d be right—you’re relentless.

I made the rookie mistake of Googling “affordable Lisbon flights,” one time and suddenly I’m damned to a month of constant badgering. For all your understanding of patterned human behaviour, have you never heard of the concept of “just browsing”? A European vacation isn’t in the cards for me, even though, as you’ve so helpfully pointed out unceasingly, “PORTUGAL FLIGHTS ARE 40 PERCENT OFF, BOOK NOW.” It’s just not happening. Given that you know all about my income level, you should have realized that.

Which leads to my second point: I’ve never met anyone as nosy as you. You’re apparently aware of the kind of news I want to consume, how big my apartment is, and the frequency with which I’ve watched the music video for Ginuwine’s “Pony,” which I’d prefer not to discuss here. I know I’ve given you most of this data willingly, but where’s the reciprocity? For all you’ve learned about me, I can barely understand how you work. You’re a black box—your keepers rarely reveal anything about you. But one-sided relationships just aren’t healthy. Friendship is a two-way street, and sharing is caring, which I know you’ve heard before since both of those sayings came up when I Googled “idioms.”

Given that you clearly have the upper hand, could you be a bit more diplomatic? I don’t like the way you see me and how bluntly you’re willing to make that perception clear. Don’t get me wrong, I would, as you suggested, like to watch just about every gay film available on Netflix, but I don’t appreciate your queer-baiting—and I’d like to think my interests are a bit broader than that. And you’re correct, I probably would benefit from buying the book, “How to Develop Emotional Health,” but it feels like a low blow to remind me of that when it’s 1 a.m. and I’m just trying to eat popcorn and browse Amazon from bed in peace.

Of course, this extends beyond my own petty gripes. Don’t think we haven’t noticed that you’ve been instrumental in some pretty shady activity with serious consequences lately. Remember back in 2015, when a Carnegie Mellon University study found that ad algorithms on Google showed high-income jobs to men much more often than they did to women? Or when ProPublica discovered last year that people could use you to target others using anti-Semitic phrases on Facebook? And let’s not forget when, in 2016, Russian-linked Facebook ads targeted voters in Wisconsin and Michigan, two states that were crucial in Trump’s eventual election win? You really screwed a lot of people over with that one.

At the end of the day, algorithms, etiquette involves more than just following the rules—it’s about treating people well, and that takes kindness. So be gentle toward us humans. If you really are, as some fear, going to be instrumental in our eventual submission to robot overlords, you might as well be nice about it.

Illustration by Saman Sarheng 

In the seconds after Melania Trump handed Michelle Obama a Tiffany box at the 2017 presidential inauguration, Jason Wong—from breakfast at a Vietnamese restaurant in downtown Los Angeles—raced to rewind the livestream he’d been watching on the Twitter app. “My brain clicked,” recalls the 20-year-old. “I wanted to post about it before anybody else did.” Repeatedly pressing his phone’s home and power buttons, Wong—as if handling a game controller—took a burst of screenshots and captured the exact still fit for his caption in mind. With reference to a 1990s movie cliché and a tweet, the meme was born: “*record scratch* *freeze frame* ‘I bet you’re wondering how I got into this situation’” above the former First Lady, upon receiving the present from her successor, staring into camera The Office-style. “It felt like she was asking ‘How did we get into this mess?’” he says of the now widely shared instant known as side-eyeing Michelle Obama. “I could relate and knew others would too.”

Who tells the inside jokes of the internet? Though memes are unavoidable on timelines, dashboards, and newsfeeds alike, the people who actually make them are often unknown with unchecked authority over what captures focus in our attention economy. Wong, with more than one million followers across Tumblr, Twitter, and Instagram, has known the power to “make anything go viral within 48 hours” since high school. Viewing the White House greeting that early January morning through meme-coloured glasses was part of his job: a livelihood that earned him over $250,000 last year, supporting him through college, in founding his own consulting firm, launching an annual meme activity book, and most recently, gifting his mother a Toronto apartment. Meme-makers are hunters on the prowl, describes Nathan Jurgenson in his essay Speaking In Memes, ever-ready to pounce on the world’s most clickable, shareable, likeable, memeable moments. Wong, garnering nearly 100,000 retweets and favourites on his inauguration gag, made the kill.

Derived from the Greek word mimema (meaning “imitated thing”) and coined by Richard Dawkins in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene, a meme is historically defined as a unit of cultural transmission spread through replication with melodies, fashions, and catchphrases as examples. Today, however, the term’s meaning is broad, encompassing the consumer-producer dualism of Web 2.0: content that scatters rapidly from person to person to create a joint cultural experience, generates by various means of repackaging, and informs the social groups in which they propagate. “We’ve developed a kind of meme-literacy,” according to Jurgenson. “We hear retweets in words.”

At their best, memes bring people together and remind the isolated that they aren’t alone. For many, they are created and distributed as “coping mechanisms,” breaking down the hard-to-swallow into playful, punchy, bite-size pieces of media. In this way, how we interpret the world online and off has dangerously shifted: Significance is now equated to virality as the overall narratives of major news events are rewritten by the memes they spawn, dictating which parts resonate and which pass into obscurity. Memes can now inspire empathy by unprecedented means, but we fail to acknowledge where or who they come from. As meme-makers increasingly partner with brands to monetize memes into so-called “ideaviruses” that spread like global infections from consumer to consumer, we must also consider how these young social media influencers can and do abuse their platforms. Within these networks, we depend on a drug and, while readily letting them exploit our addiction, don’t bother to learn our dealers’ names.

***

Viral posts are hard to predict, but when Wong sensed the Michelle Obama meme picking up traction he, for “shits and gigs,” turned on his mobile social media notifications. Within minutes, he remembers, relentless vibration alerts sent his phone off the edge of his coffee table. When he first joined Tumblr in 2012, though, memes and their demand were in infancy. “The things we consider memes now would have not been considered memes back then” and vice-versa, he says. From the original rage comics and Pepe the Frog to early 2010s Bad Luck Brian and Ain’t Nobody Got Time For That to recent White Guy Blinking and Cash Me Ousside girl, he grew up through their evolution. While the forms memes take have drastically changed, Wong reasons, the root of their value will never be substituted: They’re relatable. Bullied in school and troubled with moves between China, the U.S., and Canada as a kid, Wong—now based in California—credits meme creation and curation with his self-discovery. By populating his blog, asian.tumblr.com, with memes that worked to assert his own identity, he attracted an international community of like-minded individuals. If he felt insecure in his body, for instance, a post such as, “I wish we could donate body fat to those in need” would receive over 200,000 reblogs from internet friends affirming they felt the same way.

Jason Wong.

Wong insists the gravity of his influence is not lost on him, but some—including the Reddit user who made a meme encouraging people to heat up spoons in the microwave to more easily scoop hardened ice cream—do abuse their command. “Honestly, I could create fake news or start a religion if I wanted,” he says. When Justin Trudeau met with Donald Trump in February, for example, a meme sparked by a Reuters image in which the prime minister seemingly refuses the president’s handshake told the story of a confrontation between the world leaders. “‘I don’t know where that hand has been’ – Justin Trudeau, probably,” read one popular tweet. Another: “[Trudeau is] cold as ice.” Despite the men being cordial during the photo op, the summit’s alternative narrative was largely accepted as fact, circulating as what the U.K.-based Telegraph called the biggest display of dominance in Canada’s history. “The incredible feature of memes is that they are noticeable among tons of texts on the internet,” clarifies Westminster School of Media lecturer Anastasia Denisova. “They easily go viral and intoxicate the mainstream.”

More than just uniting online communities, memes also establish physical ones. The 3,000-member Toronto Bunz Dank Meme Zone (BDMZ) private Facebook group, for instance, encourages the use of memes to express experiences of marginalization. At monthly meet-ups (called “meme-ups”), users take their interactions from URL to IRL. “In person, I don’t have to be guarded about being queer or having anxiety because I am so open about it [through the memes I post] in the group,” says 24-year-old Lavinia Tea, a BDMZ administrator who characterizes the site as a “safety haven” where harmful biases are challenged by “promoting critical thinking with memes about social justice and sexuality.” Member requests like, “please send anti-mansplaining memes. This one classmate won’t shut up so I need a good laugh,” call for virtual support in the face of tangible oppression. Scrolling through a folder titled “Memes” on her computer desktop, Tea pulls up image macros and GIFs poking fun at panic attacks and breakups made during her own hardships. “This is our way of normalizing our non-mainstream identities and stigmatized struggles,” she says. Without the BDMZ’s strict community standards, though, Tea speculates they would not be protected from the “edgelords” of the web who exist only to shock and offend. In public digital spaces, controversial “normie” (or mainstream) memes are circulated much more invasively with little regard for whose feelings they hurt. For this reason, when a candlelight vigil for Harambe the Gorilla—a meme banned by the group for mocking traditionally Black names and body types—was held at Ryerson University in September 2016, BDMZ members were disappointed but not surprised it drew hundreds in attendance. “It was just a joke,” says Mustafa Malick, the student who organized the memorial and calls arguments the meme promotes racist stereotypes “extremely farfetched.” “People get offended by anything nowadays.”

***

Ten hours after Wong spawned side-eyeing Michelle Obama, a reply appeared in his notification tab—surrounded by an ever-growing collection of heart and looping arrow icons—accusing him of being among the most shameful of cyberspace criminals: a meme thief. “God damn it,” wrote French user Sofiane A.K. “I did it first.” Nearly identical with slight variation in wording, his meme was posted 23 minutes earlier than Wong’s. “[I was annoyed] about my lack of luck,” he explains in an interview. “I did it first but I have a smaller audience so it doesn’t really matter if I did in the end.” While products of personalized creativity, memes also conform to public formulas and scripts that would make the independent design of two identical memes possible: “There is definitely a race to create and only one can survive,” Wong says.

But can a shared element of culture actually belong to an individual? Peaches Monroe—the woman who coined “on fleek” in 2014—thinks so, now seeking compensation via crowdfunding site GoFundMe for the phrase’s use by brands and celebrities. The unspoken rules of our mash-up society built on borrowed ideas, however, reason that such cultural products are forms of commentary that belong to us all. “Once you share a meme, it starts a life of its own, without copyright or signature from the author,” disputes Westminster lecturer Denisova. “It is no longer yours.” In fact, she continues, it never really was because memes are artefacts of popular culture, slang, politics, and so on: They’re “a recycled media unit.”

Though in theory anybody can be a meme-maker, the privilege to infiltrate the public norm is highly conglomerated. Because the most “famous” meme accounts—such as @Dory, @RelatableQuote, and @lifepost—notoriously steal and repost memes in early stages of virality, “there is a definite lack of representation of good content creators,” suggests Wong. While they openly disclaim not owning the content they post, these massively followed entities secure their superiority as meme providers by interfering with any everyday user’s viral momentum, reclaiming it as their own. “They changed absolutely nothing about my tweet, not even the amount of exclamation points at the ends of my sentences,” details user @hamlllton, whose meme of playwright and composer Lin-Manuel Miranda as an unrelenting universe was taken in March. “Mine had around 200 retweets, but in a few minutes that account had thousands.” Kassandra Tate, a 20-year-old Californian, has been acknowledged for the meme since Miranda himself publicly denounced the “joke-steal accounts” on her behalf. “I see people around my college campus sharing the meme [and they] have no idea I made it,” she says. “How amazing is it that with one tweet people all across the world start using the same slang and sharing the same pictures?”

When a price is put on a meme, the sense of entitlement grows. According to Wong, a meme’s worth is determined by its ability to infiltrate everyday conversation while still seeming normal. Marketers thus employ meme-makers to create and share ads disguised as memes that will strew from customer to customer, rather than from brand to customer. Like the mistaken announcement of Best Picture at the Oscars, true memes cannot be forced or manufactured, stemming from moments of off-script authenticity. To serve clients, meme-makers—like Wong and @Daquan of Canada’s most popular meme account—leverage the trust they’ve forged with their fans; the expectation that everything they post is in some way an honest output of their genuine feelings and experiences. The popular “you vs. the guy she tells you not to worry about” template, for instance, is then applied in promoting a Burger King chicken sandwich over a competitor’s instead of the meme’s traditional and organic use by jealous spouses. “It’s all very native on the account,” says Daquan, the 18-year-old from Calgary who reaches more than nine million users on Instagram with branded memes for a living. “Most of the time you can’t even notice it’s an ad.”

***

Once discussion of side-eyeing Michelle Obama had been replaced with crowd size disputes and #AlternativeFacts, Wong’s spiking activity of Twitter impressions steadied. He knew the meme was dead. “It represented a collective feeling toward a specific moment in time,” he says. Once that moment passed, the meme did too. Albeit expiring as quickly as it came alive, the meme made Wong—and the masses it reached—feel better about the swearing in of an unfavourable 45th president of the United States, even if for a brief period.

While memes may work to alleviate some of the pain, they inherently fall far short of a cure. Rather than watching President Trump sign a memorandum to advance construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline after months of Standing Rock protests in January, it was more comforting to see a Photoshopped childlike doodle of a “dinosar” in the executive order’s place. Instead of thinking about the implications of climate change on water resources around the world, it is easier to make light of its significant impact on our ecosystems through perplexed Bill Nye The Science Guy. Laughing at the prospect of World War III is less worrisome than contemplating the potential dire repercussions of the U.S. airstrike on Syria.While this may be the comic relief some seek, these memes also work to numb—convincing many that if they’re meme-ing about it, they’re doing enough. In ignoring where the viral concepts we digest and regurgitate come from, we—symptomatic of a society that avoids investing in the escapism afforded by music, cinema, television—miss the opportunity to understand the source’s effect on how we think and act, playing directly into the hands of those profiting from our disregard.

Though he doesn’t deny the banner fits his job description, like the nuanced difference between a comedian and somebody who tells a lot of jokes, Wong resists his meme-making label. “It’s supposed to be a natural phenomenon. You’re believed to feel connected to the content because it represents you and your thoughts and ideas,” he argues. “Giving yourself a title defeats the purpose. It’s like eating. I eat, but I’m not a food eater.” In this sense, memes have come to express what our pre-internet vocabulary could not: To regularly consume them is to process life through a new language. To be a meme-maker is to have defined the words.

For more technology longreads, pick up a copy of our November/December issue, on newsstands next month! Subscribe to receive it at your doorstep.

It’s 1:30 a.m., and I’m in my family’s living room giggling and staring at my laptop screen. I’ve been online for 10 hours in a chatroom with a rotating cast of friends. We have members from every time zone, scattered across the globe; the Australians are just coming online while some of the Americans are logging off. Some have work tomorrow, most have school like me. But the current topic is more important: The newest episode of Doctor Who featured a lizard lady and her lesbian lover, and it’s a big deal.

This is how I spent most of my nights from age 14 to 18. Years online allowed me to build up a network of queer friends across the globe when I was sorely lacking any in real life.

I grew up with my sexuality a secret. I always knew that I liked girls, but people around me kept reminding me why I shouldn’t tell anyone. When I was four, a friend told me it was yucky to kiss girls. I told my best friend I might like girls and boys when I was 11; when she told a bunch of my peers at a sleepover I wasn’t invited to, they decided that it was disgusting. At 13 a teacher told me gay marriage was a sin. My French Catholic school upbringing instilled in me the idea of guilt, so I felt ashamed when I looked for queer content. Over time I learned to keep my sexuality, my feelings to myself.

My mom hooked up our household with an internet connection in 2006, shortly after the sleepover incident. I found my comfort zone online. It started slow, Googling terms and immediately clearing my search history in fear. Forums became my go-to for stories of people’s lived experiences. I’d stay up late using the web browser on my handheld video game console to read as much as I could. Hiding under my blanket with the lights out, I’d go through pages of LGBTQ support forums. I found out other people liked girls too, and that it was normal to have crushes on my friends.

Queer mentorship is complicated: In my everyday life I didn’t have anyone to talk to or look up to. But online, there were thousands of people who could offer support. My parents were initially uncomfortable with the amount of time I was spending online; they didn’t understand why I was staying up late and constantly on my phone. One night, I had my mom come into my room and meet my chatroom pals. They introduced themselves and made small talk, and from then on there was a new understanding. She would tell me to say hi to people I was messaging, and even bought a card to mail to one friend with whom she shared a birthday. She saw how important these people were to me, that I had found a lifeline in friends who supported each other. The internet can seem like a cold and untrusting place; but for youth, like me, struggling with identity, online connections are invaluable.

By 2013 the internet helped me understand the nuances of my different identities, and I came out as both queer and non-binary. For me being non-binary means being completely outside of the gender binary of male and female. I try to avoid gendering products, ideas, or behaviours. I prefer to be confusing rather than categorized. I like to imagine my gender like a void—endless and vacant.

I also started making online LGBTQ friends. Mazz, for instance, was only a few months older than me but knew much more about queerness. After my first LGBTQ dance held in a neighbouring town’s high school, Mazz encouraged me to message the cute girl I’d met and danced with. I made a Tumblr blog when I was 15 and slowly began following other blogs run by queer kids. Some analyzed queer representation in media; others were an online record of their owners’ existence as LGBTQ people. This online, intangible world became a haven: It was proof others like me existed.

My online support system bolstered me to talk openly about my identities in real life. Later in 2013, I came out with a Facebook post that friends, family, and classmates could read. A few hours later I got a message from my mom asking what non-binary meant and what she should know. That was that: No awkward conversation, no crying, no shouting. The internet helped me streamline my coming-out process: It gave me the power to plan my words and share my identities with a chosen audience, and it gave my mother time to understand and research. The next time we met in person, she used my preferred pronouns—and it’s been that way ever since.

Coming out online gives the process a form of permanence: It’s always in my web history and I can re-share it without having to stress. This year when I moved and made new friends, I posted on my Instagram story for Trans Day of Visibility to remind everyone and let new friends know that my pronouns are they/them/their. The internet also provides filters: I can easily remove those who don’t approve of my identities from my life without a scary and potentially dangerous in-person interaction.

These days I’m vocal about being non-binary and queer, and I’ve built a community offline. Online, I’ve kept in touch with my chatroom friends. I might not need them as much as I did, but we still send each other links about our favourite shows and encourage one another.

The internet has revolutionized how queer youth can learn about themselves. Queer knowledge and mentorship is more accessible than ever before. More kids will be able to educate themselves, find communities, and even change the world along the way.

Chris Kalluk, Nunavut resident, hiking the streets of Iqaluit with the Trekker, a 360-degree camera. Photo by Google.

Until now, most Indigneous territories in Canada have been omitted from Google Maps, but a new initiative from the company has begun to change that. More than 3,000 Indigenous lands and territories have been added to Google Maps and Earth.

Over the past seven years Google Earth Outreach has partnered with Indigenous communities, government-sourced data repositories, and experts such as Steve DeRoy from the Firelight Group to gather information to include in the maps. DeRoy, an Anishinaabe cartographer and member of the Ebb and Flow First Nation in Manitoba, says the project has multiple layers of use, one of which is to address identity. “Most people who explore maps like to see their home on those maps,” he says.

But Indigenous communities aren’t always represented, which led DeRoy to ask himself how he could help get these lands recognized on Google’s base maps so when they do that search they can find where they come from.

The need to officially include these lands on Google Maps became increasingly clear after Google began running Indigenous mapping workshops in 2010, which gave Indigenous peoples the tools and training to map their home territories. Some started asking why these weren’t included on Google platforms so the company set out to fix that, with DeRoy acting as an advisor.

The project follows Google’s recent inclusion of Indigenous territories in the United States and Brazil, and involved a long-term process of dialogue and data collection. All of the added territories are federally recognized First Nations reserves and treaty settlements and are searchable on Google Maps, outlined in red and labelled according to current data. This data is largely from government agencies such as Northern Affairs Canada and Natural Resources Canada, who provided the bulk of the information. “Now when you go to Google Maps and Google Earth you’ll be able to see that data actually as part of the maps,” says DeRoy.

The initiative is an important step in the right direction as the country celebrates its sesquicentennial. “We’re talking about thousands of years of occupation of Indigenous people in North America, and to be recognized on those maps—it’s one step closer towards reconciliation.”

The project is an ongoing process, and those communities who would like to add their lands to the maps or update existing areas are encouraged to reach out to those involved in the project.

For now, DeRoy is hoping to inspire other regions to follow suit: “I would love to see this on a global scale,” he says.

President Donald Trump’s Twitter photo.

Two years ago, some friends and I started our own private chat room on a service called Slack to talk about baseball. We did it because our non-baseball-loving friends on Twitter were tired of us yammering about bat flips and Moneyball and Troy Tulowitzki. I can’t overstate how well used this chat room is. We are in there every day and most of us keep a running conversation going during each Toronto Blue Jays game. We also use it to share baseball ephemera—weird facts, stats, articles, and photos. Recently, someone posted an old baseball card with Bill Murray on it. This sent us off on a chase to figure out why such a card even exists. It’s the sort of exercise that the internet is great for, and we gleefully threw ourselves down every rabbit hole we could find to learn about Bill Murray (who, it turns out, has been accused of some pretty horrible things and is probably an asshole), the history of baseball in Utah, and the many tendrils of minor- and indie-league stories from around North America. All told, we killed about two hours and seriously debated pooling $100 to buy a copy of the card on eBay.

Most of the rest of the time I spend online isn’t this much fun, by which I mean it is mostly terrible. It’s easy to be cynical about the web these days, because it can feel so far from what it was supposed to be. The “Information Superhighway” was going to open up the free exchange of ideas. It would set knowledge free and reinvigorate public debate.

Instead we got fake news and racist cartoon Pepe frogs and Donald Trump. Ezra Levant’s right-wing Rebel Media generates hundreds of thousands of YouTube views spreading hate and disinformation. A handful of Conservative leadership candidates slyly court the worst kind of people through dog-whistle memes. We built a global network of information and communication, then neglected to give it any substance.

I’ve been writing about technology and culture for two decades. I’ve never been an enthusiastic cheerleader, but I was always optimistic. I liked what the internet was doing for the world. But then came anonymous online forum 4chan and photos snapped of unsuspecting women called “creepshots” and a seemingly endless barrage of awful people who turned Levant, Alex Jones, and Milo Yiannopoulos into rich internet “stars.” Over the last year, the columns I’ve written in these pages have been about how Facebook is bad for news and Twitter is bad for discourse and Uber is bad for everybody. The year before that I wrote about photos of dead people invading social networks and sexism on Wikipedia and, before that, 800 words under the headline “#Hate.”

I say this with all the irony my white male privilege can muster, but I’m tired. Maybe we made a mistake.

Were people always this awful, and the web has just dragged them out from under their rocks? In the free exchange of ideas, do the loud, bad ones win out just because they are loud and bad? If “the medium is the message,” as Marshall McLuhan posited, the message is that decent people should go back to reading books and sending letters.

Or maybe this is the cost of knowledge: Some ideas are bad. Some people are shitty. But sometimes someone posts an old baseball card and you and your friends can spend a couple hours digging up scoresheets from Pioneer League baseball games, or whatever floats your particular boat. We built a global network of information and communication, and it’s our greatest invention. Sure, sometimes it means we need to have tedious discussions about the value of punching Nazis in the head, but it also means I get to talk about baseball. It means my mother gets to watch her grandchildren grow up in real time from the other side of the country. We have a modern Library of Alexandria and an endless archive of video and audio. We are connected to everyone we’ve ever met.

The web is still relatively young and finding its legs. I’m going to try to be optimistic that the best is yet to come and that perfect utopia still awaits. After all, it took television more than half a century to produce The Wire.

For our special 50th anniversary issue, Canada’s brightest, boldest, and most rebellious thinkers, doers, and creators share their best big ideas. Through ideas macro and micro, radical and everyday, we present 50 essays, think pieces, and calls to action. Picture: plans for sustainable food systems, radical legislation, revolutionary health care, a greener planet, Indigenous self-government, vibrant cities, safe spaces, peaceful collaboration, and more—we encouraged our writers to dream big, to hope, and to courageously share their ideas and wish lists for our collective better future. Here’s to another 50 years!

We need a new internet.

The current one is, of course, incredibly useful. It has given activists, artists, and everyday folk the world-spanning communicative powers that once belonged solely to industrial giants. But it’s become far too corporatized and centralized. Much of our online activity takes place on the servers of a small cluster of companies. This creates all manner of civic problems. It’s a lot easier for governments to spy when most of our talk is warehoused in a few massive corporate servers. Worse, it means these firms and governments set the rules of engagement. They can shut down communications they find inconvenient, throttle the speed of our connections, or —too often, these days—ignore the rampant abuse on their networks.

That’s where we come in. We need to build another internet—a parallel one controlled by its users. Specifically, what techies call “peer-to-peer” services—where my device talks directly to your device, without needing any big corporate middleman to deliver the files, the chatter, the videos.

Imagine a world in which you have, say, a photo-sharing tool or social network. It runs directly on your own phone or laptop. When your friends want to see your posts, your phone or laptop sends the files along—and your friends’ devices also help out, by passing the info along, bucket-brigade-style. It’s all encrypted, so you can control who’s seeing what, and it’s much harder to snoop. There’s no company tracking you or forcing you to look at ads—because, well, there’s no company running things at all. It’s just you, running the software yourself.

Public-minded hackers are already making this theory a reality. You could put down this article right now and go try out Zeronet, easy-to-use software that lets you run a peerto-peer website. Plenty of other similar tools are coming into view, like IPFS (for trading websites and files), Webtorrent (for sharing things like video files), Bitorrent Bleep (for chatting). If you want to be totally anonymous with a website there’s Freenet.

Most of these peer-to-peer tools are slower and clumsier than glossy for-profit ones. But as more people use them— as more people join the bucket brigades—they’ll speed up. (Donations to those making these free tools would help.) Sure, we’ll keep on using the big corporate services like YouTube or Twitter. They’ll remain great for lots of things. But we’ll have options—ones we control ourselves. The more citizens and activists do their part, the sooner we’ll build the web of us.

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.

Hugh McGuire, founder of Librivox, Iambik, Bite-size Edits, and PressBook.

Imagine Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness read by a woman with a girlish, high-pitched voice. How would it affect your interpretation of the text? What elements of the story would be heightened, and which ones muted? What effect can a reader have on a text? These are a few of the questions that arise when you sample one of the more than 3,700 audiobooks posted to LibriVox.

Inspired by open-source models like Project Gutenberg and Wikipedia, LibriVox was launched in 2005 by Hugh McGuire, an affable Montrealer with a background in mechanical engineering. Finding the selection of audiobooks on the slim side, McGuire bet that people would be willing to record audio versions of public-domain books, for free, simply to make them available to others.

He was right. LibriVox today boasts posts by 4,178 readers, of which the most prolific has posted 2,923 chapter recordings; the collection includes everything from Alfred Marshall’s Principles of Economics to Aristophanes’ Lysistrata. At the heart of the project is the belief that people are fascinated by transparency in cultural production, and that the public should have a hand in enriching the canon of available works.

With LibriVox now chugging along under its own steam, the 36-year-old McGuire is focusing on several new projects. Last October, he launched Iambik, which mines the talent in the LibriVox pool, matching some of those readers with titles submitted by more than 30 independent presses; the revenue-sharing model makes audiobook production more affordable, allowing for the creation of high-quality recordings of contemporary works. And this summer, McGuire will launch PressBooks, a WordPress-driven tool that will simplify the ebook production process for writers and publishers alike.

PressBooks users may benefit from the expertise of fans of another McGuire project, Bite-size Edits, a forum that “gameifies” the editorial process, allowing enthusiasts of the red pencil to earn points and prizes by editing the texts of books posted by publishers.

McGuire is the Canadian doyen of literary commons-based peer production. His projects enable public engagement in the preservation and dissemination of literary works, and show that, given the chance, there’s no shortage of material to share—and bookish volunteers who want to share it.

Since 2007, Maly has, like so many others, written a blog on subjects he cares about. His is called Quiet Babylon, where he writes about technology, architecture and urban spaces. But in 2010, Maly made the brave and unusual decision to quit his regular job, dip into his savings, and set himself a deadline to turn Quiet Babylon into his livelihood. Now Maly spends his time collaborating, thinking, and “creating cool stuff.”

Some examples? He curated the “50 Cyborgs” project, which celebrated the 50th anniversary of the term “cyborg” by gathering 50 blog posts on the topic from an array of writers—from fellow bloggers to the founder of Wired magazine. In April, he set up a design studio that will generate art and ideas about the concept of border towns.

Part of what enables Maly to do this is the web, which has allowed him to find and foster a community of like-minded people, while drastically cutting the risk involved in creating and publishing work. It’s an approach that in its collaborative, creative nature is eminently contemporary—futuristic, even.

In a sense then, Maly is sort of from the future. His practice speaks to the possibility that we will increasingly carve out careers in the spaces made by new technology—inventing ways to merge what we love with how we live.