For years, FireChat helped people circumvent their internet gatekeepers— the authoritarian governments and spineless corporations that control our every move through a network of proprietary data centers and deep-sea cables. In Iran, forty thousand people downloaded the app when their government blocked internet access. Over one hundred thousand protesters in Hong Kong used the app to coordinate their resistance against Chinese authority. Singaporeans, Indians, Ecuadorians, Russians, and seemingly every pro-democracy movement globally took advantage of the off-grid messaging app. What made FireChat an effective tool for revolution was its ability to bypass the centralized and often monopolized Internet Service Providers. Launched in 2011 by Open Garden, FireChat allowed people to communicate without an Internet connection. The mobile app cleverly leveraged Bluetooth and WiFi signals already emitting from our phones to create peer-to-peer connections known as a mesh network. In 2014, after Hong Kong protesters demonstrated to the world how effective a tool it was, news blogs quickly pointed out that FireChat messages were not secure. By 2015, Open Garden updated the app to include end-to-end encryption, a feature that many modern messaging apps still lack today. In 2015, Wired called FireChat a "Giant Network of Free Messaging.” Indeed, but it was so much more. The mesh network enabled by FireChat was a new internet by the people, literally. The larger the crowd, the better the technology worked, as messages would "bounce” from phone to phone until they reached their recipient.