“Hey Don, we have an unusual idea. Leak us one or more of your father’s tax returns.”

WikiLeaks slid that message into Donald Trump Jr’s Twitter DMs—an unusual request for the son of a then-presidential candidate. Since its founding, WikiLeaks had portrayed itself as the ultimate fourth estate—a digital drop-box where secrets could be deposited and released as public information. But in the runup to the presidential election, WikiLeaks’ dispatches began to show a partisan slant. There was an email trove from a hack of the DNC; a searchable database of Hillary Clinton’s emails. A release from Trump “will dramatically improve the perception of our impartiality,” the message continued. “This is the real kicker.”

Alexis Fitts is Backchannel’s senior editor. Sign up to get Backchannel's weekly newsletter, and follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

The exchange happened last year, but it came to light this year, in 2017: a moment when all of our secrets began bursting into the open. Hack after ginormous hack compromised our health data, credit card numbers, and email passwords. From the contents of your inbox to your credit card statement, every possible category of personal information seems up for grabs.

It’s also been the year that we began to hear and respond to the pieces of knowledge that had been bobbing just below the surface. Every day a news alert spreads word of a notable man who has been accused of sexual harassment. Many of these stories were previously known in private circles or stalled in Human Resource departments. Louis C.K.’s masturbation habit had been parodied on television; at New York’s Spotted Pig, assault was so common that staffers nicknamed the private dining room “the rape room.” It took pushing them into the public for the stories to finally have an effect. Susan Fowler’s harrowing essay led to a broader reckoning at Uber. Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore lost the election. Time named the “Silence Breakers” its person of the year.

Fundamental to this movement is a structural change in how we communicate. Texts and emails leave a trail, making it easier to document incidents and interactions. Secrets used to be the purview of people. Now they are owned by the platforms and databases into which we deposit them—and those have proven easy to penetrate. As more and more of our private lives are captured online, we build opportunities for our most embarrassing moments to leak.

For the institutions used to wielding information to reinforce their power, it has been a difficult transition. Private investigators and spies dug up secrets for Harvey Weinstein as a way of keeping his victims silent by owning their sexual pasts. Facebook makes easy money from the secretive system that allows nefarious actors to hide which ads they buy. The NSA has collected our private correspondence for years, unchecked.

But this unmooring is painful for the rest of us, too. Releasing our secrets willingly, as in the #MeToo movement, requires us to encounter our darkest traumas and offer them up for public judgement—to a public that may contend with our secrets in ways we can’t yet envision. In order to build this new system, we’re burning the old one to the ground, a dismantling that requires us to confront each ugly reality. This openness is the price of a better world, full of the things we want—things like a respectful workplace for women; a society free from entrenched racism; trans-friendly bathrooms. And yet: The old system may have been bad, but at least we understood how it operated.

It’s glorious, but also terrifying. We can’t choose how our thoughts and actions may be weaponized. When all information can be made public, it’s no longer a question of “if” a secret will be revealed, but rather when, and by whom. In a world without secrets, we are still learning the rules.

There is one rule of secrets we’ve learned this year: They are political. Secrets emerge when someone has something to gain from their exposure. Sometimes the motivation is straightforward. (Hackers always have a reason to get at your credit card number.) But other secrets only emerge under complicated circumstances.