We, The Web Kids | 2012
We, the Web Kids (Polish: „My, dzieci sieci”) is a short 2012 text that circulated widely at the moment when opposition to ACTA became, for many people, a first shared, lived experience of “networked” civic identity. Written from inside the early social web and released under a Creative Commons license, it quickly escaped its original context—reprinted, translated, argued with, and treated (sometimes too conveniently) as a generational self-description.
The text emerged in a climate of digital mobilisation: online organising, street protests, and a rapidly consolidating sense that the internet was not a “virtual space” alongside reality, but a layer continuously braided into everyday life. In later academic readings, that insistence—“the internet as expanded reality”—is often treated as the core rhetorical move that made the piece resonate beyond Poland.
What mattered socially was less a single thesis than a recognisable tone: impatience with institutional “interfaces,” expectations of transparency and dialogue, and an intuitive idea of society as a network rather than a hierarchy. That tone made it easy for readers to say “this describes us” even if the “we” was explicitly provisional—fluctuating, discontinuous, temporary.
I'm suspicious of generational politics in general, but this is a hell of a piece of writing, even in translation.
— Cory Doctorow, boing boing
With time, the reception invites an additional, unresolved question: how much of the text’s “career” was genuinely bottom-up—an artefact of the old internet’s semi-autonomous circulation—and how much was enabled, accelerated, or made legible by the emerging platform ecosystem and its incentives during the ACTA moment. That ambiguity is part of what keeps the piece usable as a historical document: it captures both the promise of networked solidarity and the early signs of how easily such solidarity can be packaged, amplified, and repurposed.