7 ms·

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace (1996)

143 points by Anon84 5y ago

webmaven 5y ago
I much prefer this earlier (1991 vs. 1996) Usenet post by Steve Savitzky on the Free State of Cyberia: https://groups.google.com/g/comp.org.eff.talk/c/hKpYrKXM-40/m/jXgtIgse8hgJ https://groups.google.com/g/comp.org.eff.talk/c/hKpYrKXM-40/...
dang 5y ago
Surprisingly little previous discussion: A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace (1996) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22686075 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22686075 - March 2020 (4 comments) A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace – Electronic Frontier Foundation - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16328943 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16328943 - Feb 2018 (3 comments) A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9240106 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9240106 - March 2015 (20 comments)
uniqueid 5y ago
Cyberspace 'That's right, it fillets, it chops, it dices, slices, never stops, lasts a lifetime, mows your lawn...'
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
fouc 5y ago
It's a sad reminder of the optimism for the power of the internet we had in the 90's. This sort of reality only becomes true if we all use cryptographic measures all the time perhaps.
- adrianN 5y ago
  If cryptography would work for this it would simply be outlawed.
  - freeflight 5y ago
    Funny story about that: For quite a while the US government considered cryptography, that was too secure, a "controlled munition" [0]. It took a lot of activism to change that and it's something that's still under attack to this day in the form of governments demanding backdoors into all kinds of encrypted communication. [0] http://www.geekytattoos.com/illegal-tattoos-rsa-tattoos/ http://www.geekytattoos.com/illegal-tattoos-rsa-tattoos/
    - hkt 5y ago
      You missed the best part of the struggle: how Phil Zimmerman, author of PGP, had to publish his source code in a book so it'd be protected as speech under the first amendment. His alternative was being thrown in prison for a few decades for illegal export of munitions.
- na85 5y ago
  I remember those days. There was a lot of optimism and a feeling of being powerful, especially things like watching the early days of Anonymous vs Scientology. The internet was supposed to be the great enabler of the masses, and instead assholes like Zuckerberg co-opted it to line their own pockets by selling us wholesale to advertisers. In any case, I also remember reading TFDeclaration a year or two after it came out, and I feel the same way about it now as I did then: it kinda makes me cringe. Declare independence all you want, but to paraphrase the Warden of Shawshank Prison: Your ass belongs to somebody.
  - developer93 5y ago
    Zuckerberg didn't force anyone to join Facebook, this was all voluntary, we did it to ourselves
    - hkt 5y ago
      FOMO and network effects are a powerful coupling though. And the social media companies have worked hard to ensure they're very hard to quit, too.
      - Dracophoenix 5y ago
        Society as whole, interest groups, governments, banks, retailers and their discounts, forums, HN, itself relies on FOMO and network effects. The only thing making it hard to quit is that value provided by FB as a address book to the individuals who use it is worth the trouble it causes. That's just economics. There's always a choice.
  - tomjen3 5y ago
    As I recalled it, he found himself with a bullet in the head, his life in ruins. My ass doesn't belong to anybody but me, but yeah there are people out there who wants it and quite a lot of people who want to tell me it belongs to them.
    - na85 5y ago
- rayiner 5y ago
  I was never a cyber anarchist—I always thought the Internet should be more like the open road of the 1950s than the Wild West of the 1850s. More Democratic libertarian than anarchist. I never imagined it would devolve into basically the feudalism of the 1350s, with dueling warlords not answerable to either the serfs or to any government.
  - Dracophoenix 5y ago
    No one is a serf on the internet. You can always choose another website. For all the problems Facebook has, hoarding the secret sauce building the world's largest phone book isn't one of them. After all isn't the point being of being free, whether in life or one the internet, having to answer to no one?
    - rayiner 5y ago
      Likewise in the Middle Ages you were always free to go off into the forest and fend for yourself.
      - Dracophoenix 5y ago
        You're also free to voluntarily associate with individuals who share your views and do so on your own terms. Something made more prevalent thanks to personal freedom. On the Internet, there's no limit to the ways and choices one can make to achieve that. There's no bind on your legs or whip to your back. That can't really be said for the serfs of the Middle Ages.
- freeflight 5y ago
  > This sort of reality only becomes true if we all use cryptographic measures all the time perhaps. Not necessarily, I can imagine a post-privacy scenario were absolute transparency turns private information commercially worthless by making it a good readily and freely accessible to everybody. I admit it would be a rather radical paradigm change and difficult to actually implement but actually fits perfectly fine with the mindset of "information should be free". Imho our current problem is not all the information that's collected, it's how said information is monopolized to the purely commercial benefits of only a select few.
  - antihero 5y ago
    I guess it's about personal privacy vs private privacy.
  - Dracophoenix 5y ago
    "[All] information should be free" is Zuckerberg's view in its entirety. But even if privacy was no longer an important value how that information is collected is still going to be important distinguishing factor. Information is not and cannot be monopolized. Facebook does not have special powers to extract information directly from individuals. Facebook's "monopoly", if that's what you want to call it, is in employing the best statisticians and data scientists to draw abstractions and correlations to pack and sell to advertisers. It's not about the data taken, but the metadata that's created and the secondary and tertiary observations about your life that can worked back from what you do on the website or any website with a Facebook Pixel.
- Ajedi32 5y ago
  I don't think it necessarily has to be all the time; just having anonymity available when you want it could be enough in theory. I guess the issue there is that if the general population spends most of its time on platforms which discourage anonymity then it becomes that much more difficult to achieve anonymity when you do need it. Cyberspace can only be independent so long as it is a place that "is not where bodies live". "Our identities have no bodies" isn't true if your online identity is associated with your real name and photograph. You can't have a world that "all may enter without privilege or prejudice accorded by race, economic power, military force, or station of birth" if "all" doesn't include people whose race, economic power, and station of birth hasn't been disclosed to you in advance.
- tastyfreeze 5y ago
  The internet is still the greatest communication tool humans have ever created. It may not be the completely free landscape envisioned in the 90's but the internet has been the seed of revolution around the world.
bitwize 5y ago
Yeah, this ran headlong into the fact that we live in a society. "An internet declares that the laws of his own or any other country no longer apply to him. Cyberspace then proceeds to reinvent laws and government from first principles. No technology is discussed."
- freeflight 5y ago
  But there is not just "that one society", there are many of them with often radically different values. This was an attempt to unify across those differences in a "global society" that doesn't care where you happened to be born or what you look like. Both of which are considered very important qualifiers for a lot of traditional societies.
  - WJW 5y ago
    > This was an attempt to unify across those differences in a "global society" that doesn't care where you happened to be born or what you look like. It was mostly a declaration that the author (and quite a few in their audience) wished to live in such a society, without much thought given to why the actual society was not like that, or how to change it. Then the internet grew enough to connect most of the existing society as well, but like Sparta conquering Athens it was the value system of offline society that overtook the internet instead of the other way around.
tomcooks 5y ago
When an esoteric community becomes exoteric radicalism (such as this declaration of independence) begins a watering down process that inevitably leads to loss. Skilled intruders know how to leverage sentiments so that they can get a foot in, and then control the group for political or economical gain.
rektide 5y ago
I've mentioned this a couple times recently. Tech workers union thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27581962 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27581962 Mnot's Next Layer of the Internet thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27581040 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27581040 I feel like we're very sadly entering an era where many sovereign entities of the world claim dominion & rule over cyberspace, where they assert that their sovereignty means they decide what the rest of the world might access & do. This seems to be an ever intensifying battle against liberty, of local sovereignties against the individuals & entities of the world, of many states who think they can say or decide what is available online. Every state want's it's own right to govern & control & restrict what is available on the world's internetworked systems. I do want to see the user given rights & powers. There's some pro-user activities which bring me hope, which I think companies need to accept. Globalized regulation that support the user is good. But there's a lot of other attempts to dictate terms to corporations, many of which benefit only the state or certain powers, which restrict speech or provide surveillance / anti-privacy measures. And here I think we need to allow the world to break. When anti-liberty is the issue, when it's what permissions governments have to spy & sneak in upon services, I feel like cyberspace needs more overt conflicts, more international affairs where entities say: no. No, I will not give you the access you've attempted to grant yourself. No I do not believe you have the sovereign right to get to this data. There are so many nations, so many of which would & do grant themselves powers, and cyberspace ought continue to route around these entities like the damage they are. The internet is for users[1]. [1] https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc8890 https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc8890
- gego 5y ago
  ..it is, alas, the way of history so far. The best example are the high seas. First we were in a state where Spain and Portugal ruled and claimed it all (US on the net), then a lot of contenders came in the form of other seafaring countries (GB, US...) as are now on the net (Japan, Korea, China, EU, Russia...). Finally there were so many that free navigation had to be re-established... and a balance between coastal waters and the high seas... this will most likely happen again, but it will take time and we might live in the time where a tighter national rule might be established temporarily... though I hope not. *Update:typos
polynomial 5y ago
For anyone interested, I believe this is the same audio used in the LP record pressing of JPB reciting the declaration: https://vimeo.com/111576518 https://vimeo.com/111576518
- DonHopkins 5y ago
  Sounds best on bootleg cassette tape! https://faroutmagazine.co.uk/grateful-dead-recordings-14566-online-free/ https://faroutmagazine.co.uk/grateful-dead-recordings-14566-... https://archive.org/details/GratefulDead?query=Barlow https://archive.org/details/GratefulDead?query=Barlow
belorn 5y ago
A common hope back then was that we would enter a new world by giving every child access to every book every written, with technology and knowledge being the gateway to a better future. The censorship of knowledge and culture would be forever be broken. In 2004 there was en excellent talk by Eben Moglen on the subject called "Die Gedanken Sind Frei". It focused heavily on the struggle for freedom of thought. The talk seem to me to have an persistent relevance when discussing freedom of thought, knowledge, speech, and equality.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- hkt 5y ago
  Instead, venture capital backed firms devised systems of corporate surveillance and propaganda delivery that would've made the Stasi proud. What a pity. Still, at least Sci-Hub and Libgen exist.
  - digislave 5y ago
    A lot of censorship is mandated by governments. Here in the EU companies have to pay huge fines if they don't comply with censoring laws. The problem might not be venture capital, but simply there being entities (companies) that the government can get to. Individuals fare even worse. Try to host content that your government does not approve off.
- chip-8 5y ago
  I remember that hope for a future where all knowledge would be available at the click of a button, where the internet would be used to enlighten and enrich ordinary people. The internet of today is truly tragic in contrast. A future where all human knowledge is at one’s fingertips is still a possibility. The problem is that our society is based on the profit motive. This means corporations will subsume everything they can squeeze profits out of.
  - dividedbyzero 5y ago
hkt 5y ago
I used to love this, until I saw the profound antidemocratic sentiment behind it. What Barlow is saying is that there will be a world that cannot be reached or governed, where only (rugged) individuals matter. By extension, votes will matter less, and restrictions on the abuses of the powerful will cease to be. It felt utopian the first time I read it, but now I really do see it as dystopian. After all, democracy is the worst form of government, apart from all the others.
- digislave 5y ago
  But maybe no government is better. It only says all other forms of government are worse.
  - ggm 5y ago
    The kind of maybe which is highly rhetorical. Few people typing here have experienced no government. Collectivism implies decision making, because life consists of making choices which affect others.
  - jabl 5y ago
    I believe the "no government" state is unstable. Something will fill that power vacuum. Which is why places with "no government" tend to be hellholes where warlords wage civil war trying to become the king of the hill.
- toyg 5y ago
  Perfect anarchy will require going beyond democracy. Once all individuals can internalize altruistic social values in a perfect manner, coercion should not be required. That is effectively the sentiment behind a lot of the '60s philosophy that Barlow is channeling here. The question is whether this state is realistically achievable. I would argue that most people, like you, eventually grow disillusioned enough to believe this will never happen - and with that premise, the entire discourse inevitably crumbles.
- tgv 5y ago
  When there is no or insufficient authority, people muscle their way in, until the strongest one is on top. And that's what has happened: facebook and google are the silverbacks of an independent "cyberspace".
delaaxe 5y ago
Best listened to in audio: https://youtu.be/3WS9DhSIWR0 https://youtu.be/3WS9DhSIWR0
jalfresi 5y ago
I blame NAT
RcouF1uZ4gsC 5y ago
> We have no elected government, nor are we likely to have one, so I address you with no greater authority than that with which liberty itself always speaks. I declare the global social space we are building to be naturally independent of the tyrannies you seek to impose on us. You have no moral right to rule us nor do you possess any methods of enforcement we have true reason to fear. This has to be one of the most naive statements ever to gain popularity. As long as government can still imprison, fine, or even execute people (which they can), they can enforce their will about what they do with the Internet.
gego 5y ago
If countries try to nationalise cyberspace as their "territory" that they will censor and spy on, it's clear that this collides head on with what users want... the way forward would be an international space like the high seas, but that could only be established by treaty... so it will take time for mare liberum digitalis to happen ;)
shadilay 5y ago
This text was included in Adam Curtis's film 'HyperNormalisation' which I'd highly recommend. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HyperNormalisation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HyperNormalisation
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
nickelcitymario 5y ago
In some ways, we got this future. We wanted total freedom. We got total freedom. "No we don't! What about Facebook and Google and and an..." ...listen: Freedom means the ability to choose NOT to be free. (This is the challenge that faces anarchists: How do you enforce freedom? It's a contradiction in terms. I say this as someone who would desperately like to be wrong about this, but in all my years I've yet to see any resolution to that.) We choose to use Google instead of Duck Duck Go. We choose to use Facebook instead of our own self-hosted blogs. We choose to reveal our identities online rather than use anonymous personas. We choose all of this. Yes, there's an amount of privacy violation that is happening at the ISP level that allows an unconscionable amount of tracking, and that's a fight worth fighting. But the vast majority of what we talk about when we discuss privacy is stuff that we chose. We chose wrong, but we chose. We can still make better choices, but we don't. The conglomerates of the world are winning not because of force (no one pointed a gun at my head to join Facebook or install it on my phone), but because they offered us a nicer playground. We had Second Life, where we could do and be anything we wanted. We chose Minecraft and Fortnite. We had free email servers that we could run on our machines. We chose Gmail. We had absurdly cheap storage devices that we could use to create our own "cloud" services to store all of our data ourselves, outside the reach of prying eyes or hands. We chose iCloud and Drive and AWS and Dropbox and all the rest. Cyberspace IS independent and free, or at least as independent and free as its ever been. The reason we don't feel that way is because we choose, every day, to participate in controlled wonder gardens. We prefer the convenience.
- fossuser 5y ago
  I mostly agree, but many of these choices are constrained by problems. We use gmail (or fastmail) because of the spam problem and your own email server getting blacklisted. Also the complexity and know-how necessary to be a linux admin. Many use FB (or other centralized social media) now because of network effects, but also because of how easy they are to use. Things don't have to be this way - in theory you can have a system designed from the ground up to solve these kinds of problems in a way that's still easy to use and possible to maintain. It's just way harder than doing it the centralized way and it's harder to figure out a way to generate money to make it self-sustaining. The only group I'm aware of trying to do this from first principles is Urbit - there's always a lot of knee-jerk responses when I mention them, but it's a really cool project even if it's tall odds that it'll work out in a serious large scale way. They're at least aware of why previous attempts always fail and they're not afraid to rebuild the entire stack to fix it. Ethereum and DAOs are also similar in a way - a method to have applications and organizations built on decentralized state that can actually work with financial incentives to support it. We're still in the middle of experiencing the shock of what the internet means for us: https://press.stripe.com/#the-revolt-of-the-public https://press.stripe.com/#the-revolt-of-the-public - it'll be a while before we understand how things will change, but they're already changing in strange ways - hopefully when the dust settles it'll be better and not worse.

143 points by Anon84 5y ago

I much prefer this earlier (1991 vs. 1996) Usenet post by Steve Savitzky on the Free State of Cyberia: https://groups.google.com/g/comp.org.eff.talk/c/hKpYrKXM-40/m/jXgtIgse8hgJ https://groups.google.com/g/comp.org.eff.talk/c/hKpYrKXM-40/...

dang 5y ago

Surprisingly little previous discussion: A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace (1996) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22686075 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22686075 - March 2020 (4 comments) A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace – Electronic Frontier Foundation - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16328943 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16328943 - Feb 2018 (3 comments) A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9240106 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9240106 - March 2015 (20 comments)

uniqueid 5y ago

Cyberspace 'That's right, it fillets, it chops, it dices, slices, never stops, lasts a lifetime, mows your lawn...'

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

fouc 5y ago

It's a sad reminder of the optimism for the power of the internet we had in the 90's. This sort of reality only becomes true if we all use cryptographic measures all the time perhaps.

adrianN 5y ago
If cryptography would work for this it would simply be outlawed.
- freeflight 5y ago
  Funny story about that: For quite a while the US government considered cryptography, that was too secure, a "controlled munition" [0]. It took a lot of activism to change that and it's something that's still under attack to this day in the form of governments demanding backdoors into all kinds of encrypted communication. [0] http://www.geekytattoos.com/illegal-tattoos-rsa-tattoos/ http://www.geekytattoos.com/illegal-tattoos-rsa-tattoos/
  - hkt 5y ago
    You missed the best part of the struggle: how Phil Zimmerman, author of PGP, had to publish his source code in a book so it'd be protected as speech under the first amendment. His alternative was being thrown in prison for a few decades for illegal export of munitions.
na85 5y ago
I remember those days. There was a lot of optimism and a feeling of being powerful, especially things like watching the early days of Anonymous vs Scientology. The internet was supposed to be the great enabler of the masses, and instead assholes like Zuckerberg co-opted it to line their own pockets by selling us wholesale to advertisers. In any case, I also remember reading TFDeclaration a year or two after it came out, and I feel the same way about it now as I did then: it kinda makes me cringe. Declare independence all you want, but to paraphrase the Warden of Shawshank Prison: Your ass belongs to somebody.
- developer93 5y ago
  Zuckerberg didn't force anyone to join Facebook, this was all voluntary, we did it to ourselves
  - hkt 5y ago
    FOMO and network effects are a powerful coupling though. And the social media companies have worked hard to ensure they're very hard to quit, too.
    - Dracophoenix 5y ago
      Society as whole, interest groups, governments, banks, retailers and their discounts, forums, HN, itself relies on FOMO and network effects. The only thing making it hard to quit is that value provided by FB as a address book to the individuals who use it is worth the trouble it causes. That's just economics. There's always a choice.
- tomjen3 5y ago
  As I recalled it, he found himself with a bullet in the head, his life in ruins. My ass doesn't belong to anybody but me, but yeah there are people out there who wants it and quite a lot of people who want to tell me it belongs to them.
  - na85 5y ago
rayiner 5y ago
I was never a cyber anarchist—I always thought the Internet should be more like the open road of the 1950s than the Wild West of the 1850s. More Democratic libertarian than anarchist. I never imagined it would devolve into basically the feudalism of the 1350s, with dueling warlords not answerable to either the serfs or to any government.
- Dracophoenix 5y ago
  No one is a serf on the internet. You can always choose another website. For all the problems Facebook has, hoarding the secret sauce building the world's largest phone book isn't one of them. After all isn't the point being of being free, whether in life or one the internet, having to answer to no one?
  - rayiner 5y ago
    Likewise in the Middle Ages you were always free to go off into the forest and fend for yourself.
    - Dracophoenix 5y ago
      You're also free to voluntarily associate with individuals who share your views and do so on your own terms. Something made more prevalent thanks to personal freedom. On the Internet, there's no limit to the ways and choices one can make to achieve that. There's no bind on your legs or whip to your back. That can't really be said for the serfs of the Middle Ages.
freeflight 5y ago
> This sort of reality only becomes true if we all use cryptographic measures all the time perhaps. Not necessarily, I can imagine a post-privacy scenario were absolute transparency turns private information commercially worthless by making it a good readily and freely accessible to everybody. I admit it would be a rather radical paradigm change and difficult to actually implement but actually fits perfectly fine with the mindset of "information should be free". Imho our current problem is not all the information that's collected, it's how said information is monopolized to the purely commercial benefits of only a select few.
- antihero 5y ago
  I guess it's about personal privacy vs private privacy.
- Dracophoenix 5y ago
  "[All] information should be free" is Zuckerberg's view in its entirety. But even if privacy was no longer an important value how that information is collected is still going to be important distinguishing factor. Information is not and cannot be monopolized. Facebook does not have special powers to extract information directly from individuals. Facebook's "monopoly", if that's what you want to call it, is in employing the best statisticians and data scientists to draw abstractions and correlations to pack and sell to advertisers. It's not about the data taken, but the metadata that's created and the secondary and tertiary observations about your life that can worked back from what you do on the website or any website with a Facebook Pixel.
Ajedi32 5y ago
I don't think it necessarily has to be all the time; just having anonymity available when you want it could be enough in theory. I guess the issue there is that if the general population spends most of its time on platforms which discourage anonymity then it becomes that much more difficult to achieve anonymity when you do need it. Cyberspace can only be independent so long as it is a place that "is not where bodies live". "Our identities have no bodies" isn't true if your online identity is associated with your real name and photograph. You can't have a world that "all may enter without privilege or prejudice accorded by race, economic power, military force, or station of birth" if "all" doesn't include people whose race, economic power, and station of birth hasn't been disclosed to you in advance.
tastyfreeze 5y ago
The internet is still the greatest communication tool humans have ever created. It may not be the completely free landscape envisioned in the 90's but the internet has been the seed of revolution around the world.

bitwize 5y ago

Yeah, this ran headlong into the fact that we live in a society. "An internet declares that the laws of his own or any other country no longer apply to him. Cyberspace then proceeds to reinvent laws and government from first principles. No technology is discussed."

freeflight 5y ago
But there is not just "that one society", there are many of them with often radically different values. This was an attempt to unify across those differences in a "global society" that doesn't care where you happened to be born or what you look like. Both of which are considered very important qualifiers for a lot of traditional societies.
- WJW 5y ago
  > This was an attempt to unify across those differences in a "global society" that doesn't care where you happened to be born or what you look like. It was mostly a declaration that the author (and quite a few in their audience) wished to live in such a society, without much thought given to why the actual society was not like that, or how to change it. Then the internet grew enough to connect most of the existing society as well, but like Sparta conquering Athens it was the value system of offline society that overtook the internet instead of the other way around.

tomcooks 5y ago

When an esoteric community becomes exoteric radicalism (such as this declaration of independence) begins a watering down process that inevitably leads to loss. Skilled intruders know how to leverage sentiments so that they can get a foot in, and then control the group for political or economical gain.

rektide 5y ago

I've mentioned this a couple times recently. Tech workers union thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27581962 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27581962 Mnot's Next Layer of the Internet thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27581040 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27581040 I feel like we're very sadly entering an era where many sovereign entities of the world claim dominion & rule over cyberspace, where they assert that their sovereignty means they decide what the rest of the world might access & do. This seems to be an ever intensifying battle against liberty, of local sovereignties against the individuals & entities of the world, of many states who think they can say or decide what is available online. Every state want's it's own right to govern & control & restrict what is available on the world's internetworked systems. I do want to see the user given rights & powers. There's some pro-user activities which bring me hope, which I think companies need to accept. Globalized regulation that support the user is good. But there's a lot of other attempts to dictate terms to corporations, many of which benefit only the state or certain powers, which restrict speech or provide surveillance / anti-privacy measures. And here I think we need to allow the world to break. When anti-liberty is the issue, when it's what permissions governments have to spy & sneak in upon services, I feel like cyberspace needs more overt conflicts, more international affairs where entities say: no. No, I will not give you the access you've attempted to grant yourself. No I do not believe you have the sovereign right to get to this data. There are so many nations, so many of which would & do grant themselves powers, and cyberspace ought continue to route around these entities like the damage they are. The internet is for users[1]. [1] https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc8890 https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc8890

gego 5y ago
..it is, alas, the way of history so far. The best example are the high seas. First we were in a state where Spain and Portugal ruled and claimed it all (US on the net), then a lot of contenders came in the form of other seafaring countries (GB, US...) as are now on the net (Japan, Korea, China, EU, Russia...). Finally there were so many that free navigation had to be re-established... and a balance between coastal waters and the high seas... this will most likely happen again, but it will take time and we might live in the time where a tighter national rule might be established temporarily... though I hope not. *Update:typos

polynomial 5y ago

For anyone interested, I believe this is the same audio used in the LP record pressing of JPB reciting the declaration: https://vimeo.com/111576518 https://vimeo.com/111576518

DonHopkins 5y ago
Sounds best on bootleg cassette tape! https://faroutmagazine.co.uk/grateful-dead-recordings-14566-online-free/ https://faroutmagazine.co.uk/grateful-dead-recordings-14566-... https://archive.org/details/GratefulDead?query=Barlow https://archive.org/details/GratefulDead?query=Barlow

belorn 5y ago

A common hope back then was that we would enter a new world by giving every child access to every book every written, with technology and knowledge being the gateway to a better future. The censorship of knowledge and culture would be forever be broken. In 2004 there was en excellent talk by Eben Moglen on the subject called "Die Gedanken Sind Frei". It focused heavily on the struggle for freedom of thought. The talk seem to me to have an persistent relevance when discussing freedom of thought, knowledge, speech, and equality.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
hkt 5y ago
Instead, venture capital backed firms devised systems of corporate surveillance and propaganda delivery that would've made the Stasi proud. What a pity. Still, at least Sci-Hub and Libgen exist.
- digislave 5y ago
  A lot of censorship is mandated by governments. Here in the EU companies have to pay huge fines if they don't comply with censoring laws. The problem might not be venture capital, but simply there being entities (companies) that the government can get to. Individuals fare even worse. Try to host content that your government does not approve off.
chip-8 5y ago
I remember that hope for a future where all knowledge would be available at the click of a button, where the internet would be used to enlighten and enrich ordinary people. The internet of today is truly tragic in contrast. A future where all human knowledge is at one’s fingertips is still a possibility. The problem is that our society is based on the profit motive. This means corporations will subsume everything they can squeeze profits out of.
- dividedbyzero 5y ago

hkt 5y ago

I used to love this, until I saw the profound antidemocratic sentiment behind it. What Barlow is saying is that there will be a world that cannot be reached or governed, where only (rugged) individuals matter. By extension, votes will matter less, and restrictions on the abuses of the powerful will cease to be. It felt utopian the first time I read it, but now I really do see it as dystopian. After all, democracy is the worst form of government, apart from all the others.

digislave 5y ago
But maybe no government is better. It only says all other forms of government are worse.
- ggm 5y ago
  The kind of maybe which is highly rhetorical. Few people typing here have experienced no government. Collectivism implies decision making, because life consists of making choices which affect others.
- jabl 5y ago
  I believe the "no government" state is unstable. Something will fill that power vacuum. Which is why places with "no government" tend to be hellholes where warlords wage civil war trying to become the king of the hill.
toyg 5y ago
Perfect anarchy will require going beyond democracy. Once all individuals can internalize altruistic social values in a perfect manner, coercion should not be required. That is effectively the sentiment behind a lot of the '60s philosophy that Barlow is channeling here. The question is whether this state is realistically achievable. I would argue that most people, like you, eventually grow disillusioned enough to believe this will never happen - and with that premise, the entire discourse inevitably crumbles.
tgv 5y ago
When there is no or insufficient authority, people muscle their way in, until the strongest one is on top. And that's what has happened: facebook and google are the silverbacks of an independent "cyberspace".

delaaxe 5y ago

Best listened to in audio: https://youtu.be/3WS9DhSIWR0 https://youtu.be/3WS9DhSIWR0

jalfresi 5y ago

I blame NAT

RcouF1uZ4gsC 5y ago

> We have no elected government, nor are we likely to have one, so I address you with no greater authority than that with which liberty itself always speaks. I declare the global social space we are building to be naturally independent of the tyrannies you seek to impose on us. You have no moral right to rule us nor do you possess any methods of enforcement we have true reason to fear. This has to be one of the most naive statements ever to gain popularity. As long as government can still imprison, fine, or even execute people (which they can), they can enforce their will about what they do with the Internet.

gego 5y ago

If countries try to nationalise cyberspace as their "territory" that they will censor and spy on, it's clear that this collides head on with what users want... the way forward would be an international space like the high seas, but that could only be established by treaty... so it will take time for mare liberum digitalis to happen ;)

shadilay 5y ago

This text was included in Adam Curtis's film 'HyperNormalisation' which I'd highly recommend. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HyperNormalisation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HyperNormalisation

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

nickelcitymario 5y ago

In some ways, we got this future. We wanted total freedom. We got total freedom. "No we don't! What about Facebook and Google and and an..." ...listen: Freedom means the ability to choose NOT to be free. (This is the challenge that faces anarchists: How do you enforce freedom? It's a contradiction in terms. I say this as someone who would desperately like to be wrong about this, but in all my years I've yet to see any resolution to that.) We choose to use Google instead of Duck Duck Go. We choose to use Facebook instead of our own self-hosted blogs. We choose to reveal our identities online rather than use anonymous personas. We choose all of this. Yes, there's an amount of privacy violation that is happening at the ISP level that allows an unconscionable amount of tracking, and that's a fight worth fighting. But the vast majority of what we talk about when we discuss privacy is stuff that we chose. We chose wrong, but we chose. We can still make better choices, but we don't. The conglomerates of the world are winning not because of force (no one pointed a gun at my head to join Facebook or install it on my phone), but because they offered us a nicer playground. We had Second Life, where we could do and be anything we wanted. We chose Minecraft and Fortnite. We had free email servers that we could run on our machines. We chose Gmail. We had absurdly cheap storage devices that we could use to create our own "cloud" services to store all of our data ourselves, outside the reach of prying eyes or hands. We chose iCloud and Drive and AWS and Dropbox and all the rest. Cyberspace IS independent and free, or at least as independent and free as its ever been. The reason we don't feel that way is because we choose, every day, to participate in controlled wonder gardens. We prefer the convenience.

fossuser 5y ago
I mostly agree, but many of these choices are constrained by problems. We use gmail (or fastmail) because of the spam problem and your own email server getting blacklisted. Also the complexity and know-how necessary to be a linux admin. Many use FB (or other centralized social media) now because of network effects, but also because of how easy they are to use. Things don't have to be this way - in theory you can have a system designed from the ground up to solve these kinds of problems in a way that's still easy to use and possible to maintain. It's just way harder than doing it the centralized way and it's harder to figure out a way to generate money to make it self-sustaining. The only group I'm aware of trying to do this from first principles is Urbit - there's always a lot of knee-jerk responses when I mention them, but it's a really cool project even if it's tall odds that it'll work out in a serious large scale way. They're at least aware of why previous attempts always fail and they're not afraid to rebuild the entire stack to fix it. Ethereum and DAOs are also similar in a way - a method to have applications and organizations built on decentralized state that can actually work with financial incentives to support it. We're still in the middle of experiencing the shock of what the internet means for us: https://press.stripe.com/#the-revolt-of-the-public https://press.stripe.com/#the-revolt-of-the-public - it'll be a while before we understand how things will change, but they're already changing in strange ways - hopefully when the dust settles it'll be better and not worse.