The internet may have been a creature of the US military-industrial complex and, later, a global network of computer engineers working on it for LOLs, but there is also something quintessentially Australian in the way it has taken ownership of us. The pantheon of tech titans that now rule the world subscribe to the same creed of rugged exceptionalism our forebears brought to these shores. They colonised our lives as the Europeans invaded this ancient continent: a new and foreign power brazenly staking its claim on our reality as if it had never been occupied, as though what was ours already did not warrant further consideration.

This is not to draw equivalence with Indigenous dispossession but there is an arrogance in this erasure that echoes our own dark past. They established their domain, their values, their version of reality, oblivious to what was already there. In exchange they offered up trinkets, mirrors and whistles, rewarding us for our acquiescence, our submission, with the promise of a more advanced way of being. But they didn’t tell us about the disease and addiction that would follow, the erosion of the world of which we had been custodians, the desecration and destruction of our laws and our systems of government and our culture, our very way of being. None of this was spoken of because none of these were ever considered. It was not even ignored, because in their eyes there was nothing there to replace. Our reality was simply an empty land, terra nullius.