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After a few decades of living with Information and Communication Technologies, we have got so much used to their presence in our daily lives, that we hardly realize that the societal and cultural revolution they are causing has only just begun. While most discussions still focus on privacy issues and on the impact of social media on interpersonal relations, a whole new generation of ICTs is currently entering the world, with potentially revolutionary impacts that require careful analysis and evaluation. Many everyday objects are currently being equipped with forms of ‘ubiquitous computing’ or ‘ambient intelligence’. At the same time, ‘augmented reality’ technologies are rapidly gaining influence. ICTs will result in smart environments, and new social relations. Rather than merely assessing and criticizing these developments ‘from the outside’, we must to learn to accompany them critically ‘from within’. The public sphere requires ‘technologies of the self’: the capability to understand technological mediations, to take them into account in technological design, and to shape our existence in interaction with them. The real choice is not between accepting of rejecting new ICTs, but between critical engagement and powerless opposition.

Online citizens need a digital ‘Bill of Rights’ that will protect their interests from being overwhelmed by commercial and state forces. Moving on from an outdated notion of cyber-utopia, citizens need to assert six key rights: the right to privacy, the right to own your own data, the right to a personal life, the right to avoid being forced offline for safety, the ability to switch off when needed as well as public spaces for civic debate online. Although different manifestoes and declarations about digital rights have asserted many of these principles, the internet still lacks effective governance or even norms to protect individuals. As a result, the social potential and positive affordances of the internet may be lost without government intervention to assert fundamental rights for online citizens. The key to unlocking the potential of self-aware, online governance lays in greater effort by state Leviathans such as the European Commission. It is time to stop talking about cyber-utopias and start creating cyber-preserves before the potential benefit of the internet to a democratic society is lost.

The purpose of this paper is to identify what is here called ‘fictitious public’. This is contrasted to Kant’s concept of public use of reason. One fundamental criterion of public use of reason is publicizability. This criterion involves addressing a universal audience, i.e. the willingness to expose contested arguments to public scrutiny. Making something available on the Internet may or may not be publicizable in this sense. On this background the case of Anders Behring Breivik’s Manifesto in connection with the terrorist act of July 22 in 2011 in Norway serves as a key case of the analysis. It is argued that fictitious opposes real in a sense that is different from virtual; whether the addressing is done in a real, offline or virtual, online context is not decisive of its being worthy of tolerance, as opposed to fictitious use of public reason. The important question to ask is whether the use of reason is threatening to the public. The background problem being examined here is the problem of the public. By raising this old problem in our era of digital transition it is here argued that the new technological environments is a precondition for the kind of Manifesto that Breivik has published online.

The and the is particularly important in dealing with the problem of the public, i.e. the question of how to make the public well informed. The importance of being well informed relates to issues like how to fight intolerance and fundamentalism in particular. Besides, the problem of the public is about education: what foci and what kind of methodologies to apply in teaching younger generations to broaden their perspectives? As an example, a common exercise for school children is to use the Internet to collect information for assignments. As yet, the teaching staff often seems to lack the relevant competencies for guiding their students.