I had come to look at French Revolutionary pamphlets when I encountered the fence.

It stood across the whole screen: a black barricade, high and wide, admitting passage through a single white gate marked “Continue.” Before proceeding, I was required to hear an acknowledgment of the traditional owners of “this land.”

This land?

I looked around. I was sitting in Virginia. The National Library was in Canberra. The pamphlets came from Paris. The server was probably humming in an industrial park known only to three technicians and a tax assessor. Yet somehow we had all gathered upon the same sacred patch of ground.

Actually, you know what? You’re on my turf. I am an indigenous person — of cyberspace. At last, a homeland with a reasonably well-documented date of first settlement. No disputed oral traditions, no archaeological layers, no inconvenient migrations extending back beyond the arbitrary cutoff date. Before the white nerd arrived, the blinking cursor grazed upon an empty screen.

Rocks, trees, rivers, mountains — granted, prior claims abound for those. But the JPEG of the rock, the polygonal tree, the river rendered in sixteen colors, the mountain represented by ^ characters? Those arose within our ancestral domain. The native fauna were trolls, worms, daemons, and badly drawn ASCII cats. The sacred sites were Usenet groups, dial-up bulletin boards, GeoCities pages, and forums whose moderators had not seen daylight since 1987.

Indeed, “digital native” may be the one indigenous identity modern institutions recognize without embarrassment, though even here the original inhabitants are gradually being displaced by vast migratory hordes carrying smartphones and asking why every website cannot simply be an app. My people were here before the smartphone settlers came. Before the apps. Before the platforms. Before a billion colonists boarded their little glass vessels, sailed into our waters, and began demanding that every form of human expression be rearranged into a vertical rectangle.

We crossed the wilderness with nothing but AltaVista, typing URLs letter by letter. We had no predictive text to guide us. One misplaced character could send a traveler into the void. Later, some unknown benefactor taught us to copy and paste, an invention still celebrated in our oldest songs. We built our settlements with raw HTML. Every scrap was used. We painted our words red, blue, yellow and green. We tiled the background with tiny stars. We consulted “For Dummies” scrolls to construct tables inside tables because CSS had not yet been bestowed upon mankind. Our shamans summoned special characters through the incantation of hex codes. Our homepages contained photographs of iguanas, quotations from Nietzsche, guitar tablature, collections of animated skulls and exhaustive accounts of why Rush had been misunderstood by the critics. They were not polished, but they belonged to us.

Every settlement had a guestbook. Every village had a message board. Webrings joined distant tribes. A man could depart from a page devoted to medieval siege engines and, after six or seven migrations, find himself among collectors of Soviet toothpaste labels. We called this “surfing,” though few of us had ever been near an ocean. Our sacred structures were marked UNDER CONSTRUCTION, which expressed our cyclical understanding of time. Nothing was ever finished. Nothing needed to be. A page might remain under construction from 1998 until the death of the sun.

Then the settlers came.

At first they arrived in manageable numbers. They built blogs and learned our customs. Some even adopted native names such as XxShadowWolf77xX. But the great migration began with the smartphone. Suddenly millions poured ashore without keyboards, mice or any knowledge of directory structures. They did not explore the web. They expected it to cater to them.

The open country was enclosed. Forums were abandoned and replaced by imperial platforms. Personal homepages gave way to standardized profiles. The old paths disappeared beneath algorithmic roads that carried every traveler past the same attractions. Then they began appropriating our culture.

They discovered dark mode, as though our ancestors had not read green letters on black screens since time immemorial. They invented “online communities” after destroying thousands of forums and replacing them with Discord servers whose contents vanish from public memory. They praised “digital minimalism” while carrying devices that screamed for attention thirty times an hour. They turned the personal homepage into “personal branding,” stripped away the iguana, the MIDI file and the purple text, and sold the remainder as professional identity.

And now, after all that, I find a fence across my ancestral land. Where is Midnight Oil with a ballad dedicated to my people?