The air in the arena was thick with the scent of hairspray, cheap perfume, and the electric promise of rebellion. It was Friday, the tenth of October 1986, and for my fifteen-year-old mother, Jane, it was the most dangerously adult night of her life.
Hidden in the depths of her purse, tucked between a stick of Lip Smackers and a folded-up copy of Smash Hits, were two crumpled tickets for the Whiplash Smile Tour. She had bought them with babysitting money, a secret kept from her own parents through a carefully constructed web of lies about a sleepover. Her heart hammered against her ribs, a frantic drumbeat beneath her favourite peach-ruffled minidress, a rhythm that was soon swallowed by the roar of the crowd.
That's where he found them. Andrew. He was twenty-five, a decade her senior, and he moved through the throng with a swagger that seemed to part the sea of teenagers. He bought them drinks, something sweet and potent that made Jane's head spin in a way that had nothing to do with the music. He had a leather jacket, a knowing smile, and for one night, he was the embodiment of the world Jane so desperately wanted to belong to. They partied together throughout the concert, a dizzying whirl of flashing lights and pounding bass that made every rule and curfew feel a million miles away.
Then came the final, crashing chords. The opening snare of "Rebel Yell" sliced through the arena, and a collective scream went up. As Billy Idol snarled into the microphone, my mother, Jane, screamed along with him. She knew every word, shouting them back at the stage, a true rebellious teenager of the eighties in her full, glorious swing. Her voice was raw with joy, a cathartic release into the strobe-lit darkness.
It was not the only time she screamed out with joy that night.
Nine months later, the mixtapes were silent. The minidress no longer fit. The rebel's yell had softened, exchanged not for a whisper, but for the demanding, fragile cry of a newborn. Her teenage years were over, boxed up and put away, replaced by the terrifying, profound title of Motherhood.
Ten years later, February 8, 1996, Davos, Switzerland. John Perry Barlow took the stage with these words to the world:
Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel,
I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind.
On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone.
You are not welcome among us.
You have no sovereignty where we gather.
We have no elected government, nor are we likely to have one,
so I address you with no greater authority than that with which liberty itself always speaks.
I declare the global social space we are building to be naturally independent of the tyrannies you seek to impose on us.
You have no moral right to rule us, nor do you possess any methods of enforcement we have true reason to fear.
Governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed.
You have neither solicited nor received ours.
We did not invite you.
You do not know us, nor do you know our world.
Cyberspace does not lie within your borders.
Do not think that you can build it, as though it were a public construction project.
You cannot.
It is an act of nature, and it grows itself through our collective actions.
You have not engaged in our great and gathering conversation, nor did you create the wealth of our marketplaces.
You do not know our culture, our ethics, or the unwritten codes that already provide our society more order than could be obtained by any of your impositions.
You claim there are problems among us that you need to solve.
You use this claim as an excuse to invade our precincts.
Many of these problems don't exist.
Where there are real conflicts, where there are wrongs, we will identify them and address them by our means.
We are forming our own Social Contract.
This governance will arise according to the conditions of our world, not yours.
Our world is different.
Cyberspace consists of transactions, relationships, and thought itself, arrayed like a standing wave in the web of our communications.
Ours is a world that is both everywhere and nowhere, but it is not where bodies live.
We are creating a world that all may enter without privilege or prejudice accorded by race, economic power, military force, or station of birth.
We are creating a world where anyone, anywhere, may express his or her beliefs, no matter how singular, without fear of being coerced into silence or conformity.
Your legal concepts of property, expression, identity, movement, and context do not apply to us.
They are all based on matter, and there is no matter here.
Our identities have no bodies, so, unlike you, we cannot obtain order by physical coercion.
We believe that from ethics, enlightened self-interest, and the commonweal, our governance will emerge.
Our identities may be distributed across many of your jurisdictions.
The only law that all our constituent cultures would generally recognize is the Golden Rule.
We hope we will be able to build our particular solutions on that basis.
But we cannot accept the solutions you are attempting to impose.
In the United States, you have today created a law, the Telecommunications Reform Act,
which repudiates your own Constitution and insults the dreams of Jefferson, Washington, Mill, Madison, De Tocqueville, and Brandeis.
These dreams must now be born anew in us.
You are terrified of your own children, since they are natives in a world where you will always be immigrants.
Because you fear them, you entrust your bureaucracies with the parental responsibilities you are too cowardly to confront yourselves.
In our world, all the sentiments and expressions of humanity, from the debasing to the angelic, are parts of a single seamless whole,
the global conversation of bits.
We cannot separate the air that chokes from the air upon which wings beat.
In China, Germany, France, Russia, Singapore, Italy, and the United States, you are trying to ward off the virus of liberty by erecting guard posts at the frontiers of Cyberspace.
These may keep out the contagion for a small time, but they will not work in a world that will soon be blanketed in bit-bearing media.
Your increasingly obsolete information industries would perpetuate themselves by proposing laws, in America and elsewhere, that claim to own speech itself throughout the world.
These laws would declare ideas to be another industrial product, no more noble than pig iron.
In our world, whatever the human mind may create can be reproduced and distributed infinitely at no cost.
The global conveyance of thought no longer requires your factories to accomplish.
These increasingly hostile and colonial measures place us in the same position as those previous lovers of freedom and self-determination who had to reject the authorities of distant, uninformed powers.
We must declare our virtual selves immune to your sovereignty, even as we continue to consent to your rule over our bodies.
We will spread ourselves across the Planet so that no one can arrest our thoughts.
We will create a civilization of the Mind in Cyberspace.
May it be more humane and fair than the world your governments have made before.
The summer of 2006 was a season of dissonance, a world shouting in a dozen different directions. That July, as my family celebrated the arrival of my third sibling, a tiny, wrinkled thing swaddled in pastel pink, the digital age was birthing its own new voice: a platform called Twitter, where the world would soon learn to reduce its thoughts to 140-character bursts.
While my mother nursed her newborn, exhausted and serene, news anchors spoke of a different kind of fire in Lebanon, where bombs fell and a war raged, its images a stark contrast to the gentle stillness of our home. The global chorus grew louder, a macabre symphony of demand echoing from Iraq, where the world cried out for the execution of Saddam Hussein, a grim punctuation to a conflict that had already scarred a generation.
Amidst this cacophony of birth, death, and digital dawn, a quieter, more bureaucratic hope was being assembled. In the hallowed halls of the United Nations, the General Assembly established the Human Rights Council (HRC). It was conceived as a cure for a cynical world, a new organ meant to replace the ailing and politicized Commission on Human Rights. Its mandate was grand and desperately needed: to be the world's conscience, a main inter-governmental body responsible for strengthening the promotion and protection of the freedoms that seemed so fragile everywhere else. It was formed in direct response to the perceived weaknesses of its predecessor, a promise to be more vigilant, more responsive to the violators who operated in the shadows, or in the glaring light of day.
It was a year of profound beginnings. A new life in our arms, a new platform in our pockets, a new war on our screens, and a new council born from the ashes of old failures, tasked with the impossible, eternal burden of telling the world to be kinder.
My entrance into the world in March of 2016 was not a celebrated event, but a quiet, final note in a symphony of maternal exhaustion. My mother, at forty-five, had already poured the best of her youth into four other children. I was her fifth, and ultimately, her most disappointing child, a surprise epilogue that arrived long after the story was meant to be over, a drain on energies that were already spent. The world I joined seemed to mirror this sense of weary, cynical finality.
While my mother endured the final, familiar pangs of childbirth, a different kind of fever was spreading. The Zika virus, a name that sounded like a whisper of some forgotten sci-fi terror, was ravaging its way through Africa and Asia. But the world's attention -fickle and self-obsessed - was elsewhere. It was glued to the spectacle of a bitter family divorce unfolding in Europe, where Britons offered a collective cold shoulder and voted to leave the family of peace. The world watched, begging for a different outcome, as if a single act of political self-harm could be more captivating than a silent, swelling health crisis affecting the unseen and the poor.
Across the Atlantic, the circus had come to town. A washed-out, failed businessman, with a tan borrowed from a bottle and a sneer borrowed from a darker place, was convincing America to vote for him. His stage was a rally, his script was grievance, and his most potent weapon was a two-word incantation against reality itself: "fake news." He was teaching the world a new language of denial, setting a match to the tinder of global stability, and the first plumes of smoke were beginning to rise.
And in Paris, as if in a last-ditch prayer, 195 countries signed a feeble agreement to save our dying world. It was a document born of compromise and cowardice, a whisper of concern when a scream of action was what the burning house demanded. It was, as so many things had become, much too little, much too late.
This was the 2010s. There was no place for the soft, messy complexities of humanity, no room for men of principle. It was the decade of the algorithm, the outrage, the strongman, and the lie. I was born into the noise, and the silence of a world that had forgotten how to care.
2026
The year my mother's light guttered and dimmed, the world perfected the art of looking down. Necks were permanently bent, not in prayer, but in devotion to the glowing screens that offered a curated escape. It was an age where clowns were elected not in spite of their folly, but because of it, a grand, performative middle finger to a system everyone hated but no one knew how to fix.
Every generation before us had its revolution. The Boomers had their Summer of Love, Gen X their snarling punk anarchy. My mother's generation, Gen Y, witnessed the birth of MTV and the triumphant, hollow coronation of consumer capitalism. They were all acts of rebellion, but the system always absorbed the blow and sold it back as a soundtrack.
Now, the world was running scared. The new children were here, and their revolution was not in the streets, but in the mind. This was the birth of the "woke," a term the sleeping world spat out, not understanding its power. This generation wasn't just breaking windows; they were dismantling the very architecture of prejudice. They truly sought to break the yoke.
Their question was a quiet, earth-shattering bomb: What if you could be just how you wanted to be? Not in the selfish way of my mother's youth, but in a way that was fundamental, inherent. What if everyone was truly, wholly equal? Not just in law, but in spirit? What would happen if we all finally said stop? Not to a song or a government, but to the ancient, tired cycle of hatred itself. What if we all simply chose to become humanists?
The sleeping world, comfortable in its familiar divisions, trembled at the thought. It was a revolution that asked for everything by offering everyone a place to belong. And for the old guard, that was the most terrifying rebellion of all.
The murmur began in the hallowed halls of power and the sterile glass of corporate boardrooms, a tremor of dread at this new, unquantifiable threat. It was a question that held the power to unravel the very fabric of their dominion.
From the pulpits, where stained glass saints looked down on the faithful, the cry went up. "Without a fear of God, where is the need for salvation? Without the need for salvation, where is the need for us?" The clergy, who had built empires on the bedrock of sin and the promise of absolution, saw the foundations crack. A congregation that truly, universally loved its neighbour, without threat of hellfire or promise of heavenly reward, was a flock that no longer required a shepherd. Their entire economy of the soul was on the brink of collapse.
In parallel, in the citadels of finance, the panic was even more visceral. Men who saw the world as a ledger calculated the terrifying bottom line. "If people are truly fulfilled by connection, who will buy the next new thing to fill the void?" they whispered, their voices tight. "If they find identity in community, not in consumption, our brands become meaningless. If they are driven by compassion, not competition, who will climb our corporate ladders? If we all have love," they concluded, the word tasting like ash on their tongues, "who's going to need our money?"
Their profits, their power, their very purpose, all were parasitic on a certain level of human hunger and brokenness. Universal love wasn't a virtue; it was a market correction they could not survive.
It had to be stopped: the new youth, the humanist parasites.