We already know there’s pent-up demand for holidays, typified by the number of official – and unofficial – holidays out there. Take Super Bowl Sunday, which is more widely celebrated than most official holidays. Take Black Friday, our post-holiday celebration of another contact sport, of sorts: shopping. Take April Fool’s Day, a celebration of pranks and human gullibility. And then there’s Pi Day (March 14, or 3.14 – get it?), a celebration of circumferences, math, and store-bought cherry pie.

 

So it’s shocking that we don’t already have an unofficial Internet Freedom Day, or even an official holiday like we do for the Fourth of July, given that the internet is one of the most revolutionary technologies the world has ever known. It has given us an entire universe of information in our pockets. It may connect us to spammers in Nigeria and cat videos, but it also connects us to our loved ones and people we only know from Twitter.

 

We need to celebrate. Because before the internet, we were in a different sort of dark age: We had to wait to hear news on TV at night or in print the next day. We had to go to record stores to find new music. Cocktail party debates couldn’t be settled on the spot. We had to wait years for encyclopedia entries to be updated. And even wizards like Hermione Granger could only find what they needed in a library full of dusty parchment books.