Do you think Obama’s election was an historical fluke? How about Black Lives Matter? Occupy Wall Street? Wikileaks? The Arab Spring?

And do you think it’s some kind of coincidence that they all happened around twenty years — a single generation — after Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web in 1989?

I don’t. I think digital and Internet technologies are not only decentralizing power, they’re creating a new kind of human. Homo technologicus is smart, informed, politically active, and has a global outlook. S/he disdains arbitrary boundaries, borders, and categories. She is no respecter of hierarchy and status, especially when unearned. She values authenticity and despises pretension, loves transparency and despises secrecy. She has no trouble speaking truth to power; and when she does, she expects an answer.

Prominent examples include:

Cairo-born Wael Ghonim, a former Google engineer and leader in Egypt’s social media-powered 2011 revolution. Cristina Jimenez Moreta, cofounder and managing director of the United We Dream Network, which, in a few short years, has used social media and traditional organizing techniques to build a network of more than 120,000 immigrant youth activists and allies spanning dozens of states. Ryan Shapiro, a superprolific Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request filer who has forced the FBI, CIA, and other intelligence agencies to divulge information on abuses of power in areas including the policing of dissent, surveillance, and secret chemical warfare experiments on humans and animals.

And for every famous example of H. technologicus, there are countless unfamous ones — and even the so-called “armchair activists” are doing their bit by getting the message out and changing the culture. (As Ghonim told 60 Minutes: “Our revolution is like Wikipedia, okay? Everyone is contributing content.”) Hell, every time a right winger uses the Internet, she’s helping decentralize power — which is probably why the GOP remains so pathetically overdependent on that pestilential vestige of old-school broadcasting, Faux News.

Make no mistake: H. technologicus is a lefty. True, there’s a smallish libertarian subspecies, not to mention a crazy froth of “teavangelicals,” but if “reality has a well-known liberal bias,” as Stephen Colbert famously put it, Internet culture has even more of one. (More on this in a bit.) As for mainstream Republicans….well, ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha…. Watching all those authoritarian personalities struggle — and fail — to retain power in the age of H. technologicus is schadenfreudelicious in the extreme. (Or, to quote Vlog Brother Hank Green’s epic Twitter takedown of nasty ol’ Rupert Murdoch: “Watching you become less relevant is one of the principal joys of my life.”)

In just the past few years we’ve gotten the delicious spectacle of billionaires squandering tens of millions of dollars on go-nowhere candidates, Karl Rove‘s gibbering 2012 election night meltdown on Fox News, and (my personal favorite) “ubermanager” Mitt Romney’s catastrophically failed get-out-the-vote computer system. The truth is, for all their talk about freedom and liberty, right wingers can’t quit their love of outdated, top-down, command-and-control systems. And so they keep failing hard at the national level, and will continue to do so, despite their abundant use of voter suppression and dirty tricks. So good luck (not) to them.

Barack Obama got all this way back in 2008, which is why, despite Hillary Clinton’s overwhelming advantages in name recognition, cash, and connections — not to mention his own barriers of race and a “furrin-sounding” name–he won. It’s true that Clinton faced constant sexism and personal attacks, not to mention the epic bad luck of running against someone who turned out to be one of history’s great campaigners. But it was bad judgment, not bad luck, that caused her to hire incompetent consultants who, among many other problems, never fully grasped the power of the Web as either a campaign or fundraising tool.

Every candidate would love to replicate Obama’s success. The problem for many, however, is that H. technologicus’s values system isn’t just liberal — which immediately knocks all the conservatives out of contention — it’s also at odds with politics-as-usual. H. technologicus despises dissembling and hypocrisy, and she also loves data. (Hence, that extra soupcon of “liberal bias.”)

So when, for instance, Hillary Clinton suddenly starts emphasizing her progressive bona fides, H. technologicus goes right for the Google. If what she finds contradicts Clinton’s claim, or displays any of the aforesaid dissembling or hypocrisy — not to mention, a mind-boggling level of clueless privilege — Clinton loses the sale.

Moreover, for H. technologicus, sharing is caring — and a strong reflex — so Clinton doesn’t just lose one sale, but many.

All of which brings us to Bernie Sanders. His popularity, like Obama’s in 2008, has caught Clinton and many others off guard. But the reasons for it are clear. It’s not just that there’s a huge pool of eager progressives out there, and it’s not even that his views are mostly congruent with H. technologicus’s own. And it’s not even the memeable hair. (Although that helps!) It’s that H. technologicus is highly motivated to advance her causes, and has some great tools at her fingertips.

Seemingly helpless in the face of all this, not to mention the hastening decline and fall of the relic 19th century political machinery they had counted on to prop up their candidate, we see increasing desperation from the Clinton camp and puerile mockery from journalists, pundits, and other hangers-on who probably resent their demotion from kingmaker. (Greenwald and Holly Wood sum up the latter brilliantly.)

Most bizarre of all, we see claims that Sanders can’t possibly win the general election, as if 2008 never happened.

My fellow Sandernistas and I know the truth: that we’ve got a great candidate whom we can support wholeheartedly, without having to apologize or make excuses. It’s a great feeling! And all that posting and tweeting and memeing and blogging? They’re working, which is also a great feeling.

That’s why we’re all feelin’ the Bern, and will continue to do so — all the way to the White House!

Hillary Rettig is author of The Lifelong Activist: How to Change the World Without Losing Your Way (Lantern Books, 2006) and other works.