So shame can help protect us, but it can also become a prison. It precludes change. As long as we remain invisible, as long as we dim our light, or h… - Heather Brooke

This is the information war we are now engaged in. Governments are seeking to militarise cyberspace while citizens fight for the right to communicate and assemble freely online without state surveillance.

They say everything is bigger in America but when you’re barreling along a 10-lane highway with massive trucks on either side of you and an aggressive SUV shoving your rear, it’s hard not to feel insignificant in a hostile universe. The only sensible solution seems to be to supersize yourself so you don’t get run over. It’s as if insignificance was the design brief for so much of American architecture and infrastructure. It ignores the reality of human size, let alone vulnerability, preferring an egoic delusion that humans are separate and superior to nature. But this feeling of insignificance leads to an insatiable hunger. For a bigger vehicle, a bigger house, more money, more guns - anything to feel more secure, and that security never materializes.

I’m talking of the revolutionary quality of digitization. And I say it’s revolutionary because once information is no longer a bunch of box files or papers in a filing cabinet but just bits that fly through the air, it means that it’s so hard for people in power to control it. And it’s always been true that knowledge is power. And so once it becomes very difficult for people in power to keep hold of information it means that it becomes very hard for them to keep hold of power, because power just flows out. The default now is zero cost for information to spread instantly around the globe. And in fact you have to pay money to stop it now. That’s incredibly disruptive and revolutionary.