Article content continued

The subversive logic of the protest runs like this.

If Vic Toews wants to know everything about us, perhaps we should just tell him.

All day long, Canadians coast to coast have been tweeting Toews ‘s own Twitter account with the most banal, mundane details of their lives.

Things like:

The cafeteria’s out of skim, so I put soy milk in my coffee. I think it’s making me emotional.

I hope @ ToewsVic understands that I occasionally wait too long to get my hair cut

Hey @ ToewsVic I took the last cupcake from the staff room. I couldn’t resist that sugary siren call. Feeling guilty now.

(Personally, I revealed to @ToewsVic that I hate chocolate and coffee – and that while I had organic quinoa and tomatoes in my lunch today, I cheaped out and bought the non-organic avocados.)

It started slowly, and spread across the country, until, by 1 pm MST, #tellviceverything was Twitter’s top topic.

Somehow, the gentle, subversive, post-modern irony of this protest seems to me to be quintessentially Canadian – far more in keeping with our stereotypical national character than the Vikileaks divorce feed.

There is an additional irony to all this uninvited over-sharing, of course.

Canadians already reveal so much of their private information on Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare, Pinterest, LinkedIn, and other social media sites, police hardly need to bother with warrants or investigations to track our movements or associations. And every time we use our loyalty cards at our favourite stores, we give commercial data miners far more information than we ever realize – as this spooky story about Target’s data mining practices amply illustrates.

Far from fearing Big Brother, we’ve for the most part invited him into our homes and “friended” him – or invited him to come along on our shopping trips. Perhaps the real value of the#tellviceverything “uprising” may be to remind us all how much information we already share, whether we know if or not, without a whimper of protest or concern.

And here, as promised, is our Storify selection of favourite tweets on this meme theme: