#WWWLeaks

It is 6:06 AM in Los Altos Hills, California. The sun is rising, swallowing the night's darkness and the thin 16% moonlight — four days from the new moon.

The CEO of the world's most powerful technology company sits in his night clothes, staring at a number that is climbing faster than any number he has ever tracked. Till last night he was watching COVID deaths. He is not watching those anymore.

The suicide counter reads 33,000 in the last three hours alone.

He knows the caveats — the algorithm, the underreporting, the countries that have never been able to count their dead accurately. But even discounting all of that, the number is unlike anything human history has produced in peacetime. People are announcing it on social media before they do it. Some are livestreaming it. Strangely, the content moderation teams are not taking it down. Maybe they can't keep up. Maybe some of them are no longer at their desks.

A video surfaces from a content moderator at one of the social media companies' Phoenix facilities. His final message to the world:

    "I would have done this someday anyway. This just expedited my decision and reaffirmed my disbelief in this world!"

The comments below the video are what frightens him most. Not the anger. The agreement.

It is not only suicides. Spouses are killing partners. Partners are killing themselves before they can be caught. In the United States, the firearms numbers are the highest. Mass shootings are being reported in seven states.

    #shootingthecatcher is trending on Twitter.

    "Crazy idiots. You kill yourself or kill your partner who will come for you. Why do you kill innocent people on the street for your own problems?" — under #massshooting, trending with forty million impressions and climbing.

The CEO knows why the COVID numbers started looking better last week. It was never a real improvement. The world's attention had simply moved to something larger. Somewhere, he notices, the same dashboard templates are being repurposed — the same color coding, the same county-by-county breakdowns — now tracking a different catastrophe.

He types. He has never asked anything of his followers before. Not like this.

    "Guys, this is not the end of the world. We have survived deadlier catastrophes and come out stronger. Please don't end your lives for this. We are all in this together. We will come out of it together. Please listen to me. You will thank me for this later."

Nine million retweets. Twenty-one million likes. Both records in Twitter's history.

He is not on any other platform. He considers them junk — architecturally dishonest, built on surveillance, sustained by engagement-at-any-cost. He has a particular contempt for one CEO in that world, someone he regards as having built an empire on the ruins of private life. "What moral standards can you expect from an app built by someone with zero values?" he has said, in rooms he believed were private.

His phone rings. It is that CEO.

"Hey. What do we do? Shall we shut the whole thing down until we figure this out? An e-lockdown. That's the only answer."

"Shut down the internet? Are you serious? Technology got us into this — but it's also the only thing helping us manage it. Switching it off kills more people than it saves. Get the president on a call. This is a war against humanity. It is not a technology problem anymore."

*

It happened at 3:00 AM Pacific Standard Time.

No one has claimed responsibility. The theories are already multiplying. A Chinese state actor. A Russian intelligence operation. Someone in Hawaii — because it was midnight there, and 12 AM felt like the kind of time someone would choose for something this large.

The Bay Area engineers, however, suspect something closer to home. An insider.

    "If all they wanted was money, they would have targeted only the rich. The motive here is something larger than life." — a celebrity with forty million followers.

    "Or something much sillier than any of us can imagine." — an account with eleven followers.

*

What happened, exactly?

At 3:00 AM, something broke inside the architecture of the internet — or was broken — in a way that no one has explained yet. Every search query stopped returning search results. Instead, it returned data. Not random data.

The most unforgettable data. What people had hidden from themselves. What others had hidden from them. What the world's most powerful institutions had hidden from everyone.

The things people most needed to forget. The things most true about them that they most wanted to be false. And the secrets kept not by them but for them — or against them — by others.

A man in Atlanta asks his phone, "Hey Siri, how is the weather?" He receives, at the top of the search results, an email he sent to an ex-girlfriend more than a decade ago. An email he deleted. From an account he closed. The word "weather" does not appear anywhere in it. He tweets about it because that is, apparently, what people do when they are shaken — they tell strangers.

A man named Kavin in Chennai searches for "thalaivar" at 3:30 PM local time. What returns is a PDF attachment from an HR email sent by the IT department of his first company, in his second month, the week before he was fired. It is his own browsing history. He had spent years trying to forget that chapter. He deleted that email account before his next job interview.

And then there is Olivia in London.

Olivia searches for the top ten albums of the year at 11:00 AM. What appears on her screen is not a music chart. It is her boyfriend Arthur's chat history — every conversation with every girlfriend he has had since secondary school, organized chronologically, annotated with photographs. She calls him immediately. His line is busy. It has been busy for forty minutes.

"It's not my chat history showing on my screen. It's his," she tells the colleague sitting next to her. "How is that even possible? Imagine who is reading mine right now."

Each of these people made the same discovery when they tried to search for something else immediately afterward: the results did not change. Whatever they searched for, they received the same answer — the thing they most needed not to see.

The technology forums are alive.

    "I can't wait to understand how this was done. It's not just email — it's chat history, search history, browsing history, all of it. This is not an accidental leak. Someone designed this. But what is the algorithm? And what is the motivation?"

    "Also the things that others kept from us. And the things we kept from others."

    "The man who did this could be in this forum right now."

    "How do you know it was one man?"

    "How do you know it was a man?"

    "How do you know it wasn't a government?"

    "The most terroristic governments are the democratically elected ones."

    "This is not a political forum. We are here to solve the world's biggest technology problems."

    "That is exactly what we are doing."

*

Louisiana

"Who is Emma?"

"I don't know."

"You have exchanged more than 300,000 words with her."

"You don't need to know."

"First you said you don't know. Now you say I don't need to know. I need to know. Tell me where she is."

"You won't need to know."

"If you don't tell me, I will kill myself."

"You don't need to do that. I will do that for you."

Poomb.

*

Nevada

"You told me everything."

"Yes."

"No, you didn't. Who is Bill?"

"You don't want to know."

"I do want to know."

"I don't have to tell you."

"You do. Otherwise —"

"Otherwise —"

Poomb.

*

California

"Why didn't you tell me before?"

"We were going to. When the time was right."

"When was the right time going to come? After you both died?"

"We don't care where our real son is. You have been our son for eighteen years. You will always be our son."

"You don't care about your son. I care about my parents. I want to know where they are."

Aditya walked out of the room and did not come back that evening. His parents sat at the kitchen table for a long time, not speaking. Whatever they said, and they said a great deal, was not enough to fill what had opened up in him.

*

    "WikiLeaks is nothing. What you are witnessing today is the mother of all leaks in human history. #WWWLeaks"

    "We thought they were a technology company. They have been an intelligence agency. 99% of their own employees don't know this yet. #WWWLeaks"

    "Two of the biggest banks in the world rigged the global financial system together. Here is the text thread. #WWWLeaks"

    "How two pharma giants we believed were competitors colluded to keep the world in a permanent state of treatable but uncured disease. #WWWLeaks"

Boards are convening. With COVID restrictions still in place, they meet virtually — aware, now, that virtual meetings are not private. That nothing is private. Deciding, in the end, that there is nothing left to protect, so they may as well proceed. CEOs are being sacked by boards. Deputies are being sacked by CEOs. Some leaders are tweeting that their physical safety is at risk. Several nuclear secrets are now publicly known in at least forty countries.

    "PEOPLE. PLEASE USE DISCRETION. NOT EVERYTHING YOU ARE READING IS TRUE. HACKERS AND CONSPIRACY THEORISTS ARE USING THIS MOMENT TO SPREAD LIES. #WWWLeaks" — the most powerful person on the planet.

The reply with the most likes:

    "So you're confirming that some of it is true?"

No response.

    "Today's Tarot card for the world is DEATH — in an upright position. It doesn't mean what you think. It doesn't mean the end. It means we must start everything over again. It is the death of life as it was until today. Tomorrow has to be a new day and a new life. #WWWLeaks"

*

Nila is thirteen years old. She lives in a village in South India. Last year, NASA's Administrator wrote her a letter acknowledging her observations on astrophysics. Today she tweets something that gets more attention than she expected:

    "Check this. Every piece of data leaked today belongs to mature democracies with sophisticated data protection laws. I don't see any data from authoritarian regimes. Something to think about. #WWWLeaks"

The reply with the second-most likes:

    "That means our nuclear secrets are now theirs. And theirs are still theirs."

*

It is 8:01 PM in Los Altos Hills, California. The sun has set in the west. The darkness is returning — not total darkness, a waning crescent with 10% light, enough to see by if you know where to look.

Tomorrow there will be a sunrise again. In the east. At exactly 6:06 AM.