It is time to think of resistance in a new way, something that is no longer carried out to reform a system but as an end in itself. African-Americans understood this during the long night of slavery. German opposition leaders understood it under the Nazis. Dissidents in the former Soviet Union knew this during the nightmare of communism. Resistance in these closed systems was local and often solitary. It was done with the understanding that evil must always be defied. The tiny acts of rebellion—day after day, month after month, year after year and decade after decade—exposed to everyone who witnessed them the heartlessness, cruelty and inhumanity of the oppressor. They were acts of truth and beauty.

We’ve worked out that we don’t need shops when we can buy online and we’ve worked out that we don’t need advertising because we can now find anything we want. For the first time, we’re seeing mainstream campaigns that drive no incremental search or web traffic. That’s a first. You can spend millions on TV and not see anything in your search or traffic stats. Why? Because everyone who might be interested in your product is already looking for it and they’re not hanging around long enough to see the commercial in the ad break.

Solidarity has gone hypertextual. The student movement that made its voice so powerfully audible in the fee protests was largely organised on Twitter using the hashtag #solidarity. “Being able to contact thousands of people with one short tag was really important,” says Jessica, 20, a student activist who claims to have been “radicalised” by Twitter. “#Solidarity has very obviously now become the link between all of those fighting against the same government in different ways,” she goes on.

The US state today is a nexus of power for corporate interests. Since it must pretend to serve the people, it fears the truth may leak. Hence its parallel campaigns against WikiLeaks: to crush it through the precarity of the internet and to formally limit freedom of the press.

States seek to imprison the Anonymous protesters rather than official torturers and murderers. The day when our governments prosecute war criminals and tell us the truth, internet crowd control may be our most pressing remaining problem. I will rejoice if I see that day.