6 ms·

Leaving the Physical World

228 points by andsoitis 6mo ago

actionfromafar 6mo ago
"While these electronic thickets may afford the best guerrilla jungle that ever harbored discontents, certain kinds of technological development could render it as flat and barren of hiding places as the salt deserts of the American West."
jdw64 6mo ago
Reading this essay brought tears to my eyes. To me, the physical world is a realm permitted only to those with wealth. The author beautifully romanticizes the evaporation of tangible labor, but the physical labor I actually experienced meant unpaid, stolen wages. It meant working through the night, dozing off on the early morning subway until the very last stop, and enduring endless contempt, humiliation, and the toxic community that came with it. I sought a new community in cyberspace, and the world claims that this space rewards you. But looking at it now, that structure also seems reserved for a very specific class. Especially with the advent of AI, it feels like the time I had left to learn and actually build something has run out. Cyberspace, which I chose as an escape, is ultimately dominated by real-world capital. And if you want to catch up to the early settlers, there isn't much you can do as a citizen of the Third World. Between China's self-sustaining ecosystem and America's global standard, there is no place for me. The physical frontier is closed, and I arrived too late even for the cyber frontier. Language barriers, capital, platforms—they form just another rigid hierarchy. To enter the open-source world, someone from the periphery must learn English, assimilate into its cultural nuances, and master programming languages that are inherently far more difficult to learn if your native tongue is not English. There are countless more gates to pass through, yet the seats are strictly limited. This essay spoke of a free and open frontier, but for someone like me, it is merely standing outside a shining castle, longing for it, shouting for someone to open the gates. But I do not possess the skills that the people inside that castle desire and admire. I have merely migrated from a physical colony to a digital one. How much longer can I be consumed like this? Sometimes, the inside of that castle—as seen on HN—looks so warm. But my reality is always cold. I simply envy those who were privileged enough to experience the 90s cyber-romanticism portrayed in this essay.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 6mo ago
  Beautifully well said.
- fc417fc802 6mo ago
  > Especially with the advent of AI, it feels like the time I had left to learn and actually build something has run out. Why? Just go build stuff! AI makes an excellent tutor assuming you can exhibit a bit of self awareness and ask directed questions. > yet the seats are strictly limited. Why do you say that? > But I do not possess the skills that the people inside that castle desire and admire. I appreciate the seemingly unfair added difficulty of integrating as a foreigner. But as far as not possessing the desired skills, what's preventing you from learning them on your own?
  - deleted 6mo ago
    [deleted]
  - jdw64 6mo ago
    Thank you for your encouragement, and I know it's sincere. In a purely technical sense, if you have the resources, AI is an good tutor I'm constantly astonished by it myself. However, the difficult part about what you said is this before AI, even relatively simple tasks carried a certain cost. But with the introduction of AI, that cost has actually gone up. And honestly, what shocked me when I first encountered AI was that the code it introduced was several orders of magnitude more impressive than anything I had access to in my environment. Of course, I'm not saying I was diligently studying open source code before that. The environments where I primarily studied were centered around old books like Effective C++ or EIP. My skills themselves were outdated, and the code I was commissioned to work on in Korea and Japan was also built on very lagcy technology. The kind where everything is crammed into a single PHP view, or where a WinForm application controls everything through one global singleton—essentially procedural programming and heavyweight coding. But with the introduction of AI, surviving on these so-called legacy technologies suddenly became drastically more difficult. The problem was, most of the documentation I could access was this outdated. It's not that I delayed my studies, either. For instance, I knew Redis was released in 2009, but the first time I actually used it was in 2020. The gap between America and the non-American world is that vast. So, learning modern coding techniques actually took quite a long time. Patterns like the event bus pattern, which I'm familiar with now, and other specific patterns. So I'm not denying your goodwill—as you said, I am taking on my own challenges. It's just that AI has been a field of shock, making me realize just how narrow my world was and how terribly inadequate my coding skills are. And to close that skill gap, I'm reading HN.
davidwritesbugs 6mo ago
His "A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace" was the most unintentionally comical thing I read at the time. Like his lyrics and prose it was woefully pretentious & leaden. I also met him once. A more unpleasant, up his own ass, person I can barely recall.
- block_dagger 6mo ago
  Yeah, well, that’s just, like, your opinion, man.
  - HerbManic 6mo ago
    I think he is saying Barlow is more of a Walter than The Dude. ,;)
- embedding-shape 6mo ago
  Great, anything else nonconstructive to add about the actual article, or you just felt like this was a good moment to try to put down another human for no reason?
  - vinceguidry 6mo ago
    Gen Z needs to chill on this expectation of unrelenting positivity. Or I guess y'all can just keep vaping to deal with the stress.
    - embedding-shape 6mo ago
      Not sure what Gen Z people you've met, but everyone I've met seemed depressed if anything to me. But also, don't really hang out with kids, so probably just the few I've met. I don't care about it being positive or negative, but at least make it constructive and at least make it on topic instead of just spewing unrelated nonsense, but I guess it's hard for boomers to avoid posting their typical knee-jerk reactions publicly.
      - 6mo ago
throwanem 6mo ago
[flagged]
karel-3d 6mo ago
(1998) edit: so 1994
dzonga 6mo ago
> bytes which no one can chew, architecture no one can inhabit, and software which keeps no cold winter wind from anyone's bodies. this hits hard. hopefully we can start making physical stuff again & teaching kids how to do so.
- flyinghamster 6mo ago
  I was ranting about the demise of American manufacturing as I was entering the workforce forty years ago, and it seems that nothing has improved in that sphere. Sure, dismantling General Electric produced a supernova of shareholder value, but the problem with supernovas is that once they're done, they're done.
  - aidenn0 6mo ago
    This piece was written over 30 years ago.
  - deepsun 6mo ago
    > One of the more intriguing results of a recent Cato Institute–commissioned poll about trade and globalization was the respondents’ views on manufacturing. When asked whether the country would be better off if more Americans worked in the sector, 80 percent responded in the affirmative. Given widespread perceptions of American industrial decline—very much at odds with available evidence—that’s not entirely surprising. But here’s the interesting part: among those same respondents, just 25 percent stated that they would personally be better off in a factory instead of their current work. It’s a result that holds across class, education, and racial lines. The most enthusiastic group, those aged 18–29, still registered just 36 percent interest in manufacturing employment. Americans love the idea of people working in manufacturing, but most don’t think they would benefit from such work themselves. source: https://www.cato.org/blog/americans-think-manufacturing-employment-greatfor-other-people https://www.cato.org/blog/americans-think-manufacturing-empl...
RickJWagner 6mo ago
“Here, guns were part of the furniture, and my taciturn neighbors used them on one another with heart-breaking regularity. These domestic killers rarely went to jail, since they could usually remind the jury that the deceased, whom most of the jurors knew, needed killing anyway.” It’s enjoyable reading, but I realized the author wasn’t to be taken seriously at this point.
- erikerikson 6mo ago
  Please explain.
  - eks391 6mo ago
    I think he is suggesting that this article is heavily exaggerated, or possibly written more as entrainment rather than to express fact. He quotes the misuse of rule of law to prove his point. Up to you whether you agree. There are lots of examples in American past where mob mentality weighed more than law, so that example doesn't disprove the article for me but I hope it is entertainment instead of fact.
  - RickJWagner 6mo ago
    I’ve lived much of my life in the upper Midwest and have close relatives in Wyoming. Nobody behaves like that. Ever. The environment is harsh and people unfailingly help each other. Law and order is respected. The culture is one of independence, but rooted strongly in public good. What the author wrote must surely have been an attempt at humor in the Patrick F. McManus vein.
    - funimpoded 6mo ago
      Can confirm, that kind of thing (murder that the jury decide was OK because they had it coming, or a town collectively deciding and sticking to “we didn’t see nothin’” so a prosecution can’t proceed) happens, but it’s so rare most rural-dwellers never see it anywhere near them in a lifetime. Unless it’s cops covering up for other cops or their pals, but I mean, even that’s not exactly an everyday occurrence (at least at the level of things like murder). Approximately nowhere in the US is this normal among ordinary folks.
mohamedkoubaa 6mo ago
Masterclass in navel gazing
- deleted 6mo ago
  [deleted]
pwillia7 6mo ago
Reminds me of Wendell Berry or even Cormac Mccarthy's writing. Great piece.
RetroTechie 6mo ago
Insightful, funny, colorful, visionary in places & not a speck of naivety in sight. Well worth the read. "(..) tending to favor the creation of small, fast-moving, short-lived adhocracies...digitized hunter-gatherer groups roaming the steppes of Cyberspace." They're called startups. Or hacker groups, if you will. Not much difference between those 2 imho.
cb321 6mo ago
I think this was written in 1994 for this conference https://seclists.org/interesting-people/1994/Mar/64 https://seclists.org/interesting-people/1994/Mar/64 , but I'm not 100% sure. It refers to "last summer's coup in the Soviet Union" which may also date it. Maybe it should have a (1994) in the title. Or, I don't know, maybe it's from even earlier? Some of the other pieces have nice dates at the bottom, like the Declaration of Independence for Cyberspace a bit over 30 years ago. EDIT: @karel-3d elsethread seems to think this one is (1998).
- fredoralive 6mo ago
  It would presumably be the August 1991 coup if it were the Soviet Union, as it was one of the factors leading to the USSR dissolving at the end of the year. The Autumn 1993 coup was in the Russian Federation (and the geriatric plotters in the Kremlin kinda won that one). So 1992?
  - cb321 6mo ago
    That's what I thought, too, but the top of the article says "For the Conference on HyperNetworking, Oita, Japan" which was in '94. So, I thought maybe "last summer" was internally even off by a couple years? I'm really not sure, but someone around these parts probably knows. Worth mentioning that also in the early 90s people did refer to the Russian Federation as the Soviet Union sometimes as a shortening of "the former Soviet Union". The estimate of "The Internet" connecting 800,000 computers is probably also pretty surgically date-identifying (at least to isolate 1992 to 1998 given how fast it was growing at the time, though estimation error might cause a little trouble!). For example, https://web.mit.edu/people/mkgray/net/internet-growth-summary.html https://web.mit.edu/people/mkgray/net/internet-growth-summar... also suggests 1994 (although that estimate was 0.6 million) while 1992 would be more like 200,000 although as per my scare quotes (and that MIT link) "The Internet" was also a somewhat vague term at the time. And by 1998 it was surely over 10 million which makes the @karel-3d quite likely incorrect, although who knows - maybe that's when the EFF first put it up on their web site? EDIT: I mostly think it matters since observations that might have seemed quite prescient in 1992 (like also-Mormon Orson Scott Card's even more prescient ideas in 1985 Ender's Game with Locke & Demosthenes political chat personas based on 1980s BBS/UUCP network activity) were very much things everyone was saying by 1998.
bpoyner 6mo ago
He's describing my great grandmother's childhood in territorial Arizona, down to the riding a horse to a one-room school house. Her family were all tough ranchers living a lifestyle most of us can't really comprehend.
- deleted 6mo ago
  [deleted]
layer8 6mo ago
(1992) (See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48136937 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48136937.)
aidenn0 6mo ago
> I believe most of this activity is a giant make-work project designed to keep us out of trouble and on the payroll while Asian robots churn out most of the physical things we really need... Asian, yes. Robots, no (or at least not in the sense of the sci-fi image of one man in a factory whose only job is to press "start" at the beginning of the shift and "stop ad the end of the shift). We didn't abolish the labor, we reduced it a bit and moved it away from us. [edit] Productivity in Asia was even lower when this article was written (no date, but mentions that there are 800,000 computers on the internet).
ynac 6mo ago
Anyone see a link to the audio / video, or better transcription? The text seems to have been transcribed and the typos / mistakes are splitting the intended meanings of things. Some of which seem to be causing misunderstandings in here. (Dialup for the day here, or I'd do it myself)
deepsun 6mo ago
There's no date in it. What it was written?
- taneliv 6mo ago
  1992 and 1993 are argued in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48136937 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48136937. Article mentions: > That this approach works was demonstrated during last summer's coup in the Soviet Union. I don't think it can mean anything else than the coup attempt in August 1991.
gricardo99 6mo ago
An incredible, lucid, and beautiful depiction of the burgeoning, inchoate world of cyberspace at the time — voicing an anxiety that echoes even louder today: We humans would be liberated into an Elysian condition of permanent leisure. We’d have nothing to do but hang out in our indestructible miracle-fiber jumpsuits and talk philosophy. Only it didn’t happen quite like that. The machines did get many of our physical jobs alright, but no one could quite figure out how to pay us for all that hanging out. What would John make of what’s unfolded since? Much as he envisioned and embraced, humanity poured its imagination, creativity, toil, and love into cyberspace — only for the machines to feed on it all and usher in a new, all-encompassing level of human obsolescence.
- deepsun 6mo ago
  A good answer: "The Intolerable Hypocrisy of Cyberlibertarianism" [1] And discussion [2]. [1] https://matduggan.com/the-intolerable-hypocrisy-of-cyberlibertarianism/ https://matduggan.com/the-intolerable-hypocrisy-of-cyberlibe... [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48074952 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48074952
01100010x 6mo ago
[dead]
andijati2 6mo ago
[dead]
1vuio0pswjnm7 6mo ago
(2018)
hirvi74 6mo ago
I lived a similar life to this growing up in TN about 16 years or so ago. I didn't necessarily enjoy the labor, the loneliness, etc.. Though, as I age I become more and more thankful for the environment I grew up in. Wrangling horses, dropping trees in the summer for wood for the winter, and all kinds of other arduous tasks. My father grew up on a much larger farm, and I can tell that despite leaving it during his adulthood, he always wanted to return. He made it his life mission to impart as much of his wisdom and knowledge onto me as possible, and that is perhaps what I am most thankful for.
Jimidesuu 6mo ago
You just made me realize once again how huge this world is... The world we live in has multiple perspective and to find it here on HN is actually a way for me to understand that life doesn't just revolve to what's going on around me and I felt that through your words and experience, At the end of the day, we all live and I believe that's how peace of mind comes in when you stop and take a look first at everything
deleted 6mo ago
[deleted]
AIorNot 6mo ago
This guy was the real most interesting man in the world btw. Read his bio: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Perry_Barlow https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Perry_Barlow
tempaccountabcd 6mo ago
[dead]
jgkelley 6mo ago
How did you come upon the essay? Asking as an EFF staff member.

228 points by andsoitis 6mo ago

"While these electronic thickets may afford the best guerrilla jungle that ever harbored discontents, certain kinds of technological development could render it as flat and barren of hiding places as the salt deserts of the American West."

jdw64 6mo ago

Reading this essay brought tears to my eyes. To me, the physical world is a realm permitted only to those with wealth. The author beautifully romanticizes the evaporation of tangible labor, but the physical labor I actually experienced meant unpaid, stolen wages. It meant working through the night, dozing off on the early morning subway until the very last stop, and enduring endless contempt, humiliation, and the toxic community that came with it. I sought a new community in cyberspace, and the world claims that this space rewards you. But looking at it now, that structure also seems reserved for a very specific class. Especially with the advent of AI, it feels like the time I had left to learn and actually build something has run out. Cyberspace, which I chose as an escape, is ultimately dominated by real-world capital. And if you want to catch up to the early settlers, there isn't much you can do as a citizen of the Third World. Between China's self-sustaining ecosystem and America's global standard, there is no place for me. The physical frontier is closed, and I arrived too late even for the cyber frontier. Language barriers, capital, platforms—they form just another rigid hierarchy. To enter the open-source world, someone from the periphery must learn English, assimilate into its cultural nuances, and master programming languages that are inherently far more difficult to learn if your native tongue is not English. There are countless more gates to pass through, yet the seats are strictly limited. This essay spoke of a free and open frontier, but for someone like me, it is merely standing outside a shining castle, longing for it, shouting for someone to open the gates. But I do not possess the skills that the people inside that castle desire and admire. I have merely migrated from a physical colony to a digital one. How much longer can I be consumed like this? Sometimes, the inside of that castle—as seen on HN—looks so warm. But my reality is always cold. I simply envy those who were privileged enough to experience the 90s cyber-romanticism portrayed in this essay.

2OEH8eoCRo0 6mo ago
Beautifully well said.
fc417fc802 6mo ago
> Especially with the advent of AI, it feels like the time I had left to learn and actually build something has run out. Why? Just go build stuff! AI makes an excellent tutor assuming you can exhibit a bit of self awareness and ask directed questions. > yet the seats are strictly limited. Why do you say that? > But I do not possess the skills that the people inside that castle desire and admire. I appreciate the seemingly unfair added difficulty of integrating as a foreigner. But as far as not possessing the desired skills, what's preventing you from learning them on your own?
- deleted 6mo ago
  [deleted]
- jdw64 6mo ago
  Thank you for your encouragement, and I know it's sincere. In a purely technical sense, if you have the resources, AI is an good tutor I'm constantly astonished by it myself. However, the difficult part about what you said is this before AI, even relatively simple tasks carried a certain cost. But with the introduction of AI, that cost has actually gone up. And honestly, what shocked me when I first encountered AI was that the code it introduced was several orders of magnitude more impressive than anything I had access to in my environment. Of course, I'm not saying I was diligently studying open source code before that. The environments where I primarily studied were centered around old books like Effective C++ or EIP. My skills themselves were outdated, and the code I was commissioned to work on in Korea and Japan was also built on very lagcy technology. The kind where everything is crammed into a single PHP view, or where a WinForm application controls everything through one global singleton—essentially procedural programming and heavyweight coding. But with the introduction of AI, surviving on these so-called legacy technologies suddenly became drastically more difficult. The problem was, most of the documentation I could access was this outdated. It's not that I delayed my studies, either. For instance, I knew Redis was released in 2009, but the first time I actually used it was in 2020. The gap between America and the non-American world is that vast. So, learning modern coding techniques actually took quite a long time. Patterns like the event bus pattern, which I'm familiar with now, and other specific patterns. So I'm not denying your goodwill—as you said, I am taking on my own challenges. It's just that AI has been a field of shock, making me realize just how narrow my world was and how terribly inadequate my coding skills are. And to close that skill gap, I'm reading HN.

davidwritesbugs 6mo ago

His "A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace" was the most unintentionally comical thing I read at the time. Like his lyrics and prose it was woefully pretentious & leaden. I also met him once. A more unpleasant, up his own ass, person I can barely recall.

block_dagger 6mo ago
Yeah, well, that’s just, like, your opinion, man.
- HerbManic 6mo ago
  I think he is saying Barlow is more of a Walter than The Dude. ,;)
embedding-shape 6mo ago
Great, anything else nonconstructive to add about the actual article, or you just felt like this was a good moment to try to put down another human for no reason?
- vinceguidry 6mo ago
  Gen Z needs to chill on this expectation of unrelenting positivity. Or I guess y'all can just keep vaping to deal with the stress.
  - embedding-shape 6mo ago
    Not sure what Gen Z people you've met, but everyone I've met seemed depressed if anything to me. But also, don't really hang out with kids, so probably just the few I've met. I don't care about it being positive or negative, but at least make it constructive and at least make it on topic instead of just spewing unrelated nonsense, but I guess it's hard for boomers to avoid posting their typical knee-jerk reactions publicly.
    - 6mo ago

throwanem 6mo ago

[flagged]

karel-3d 6mo ago

(1998) edit: so 1994

dzonga 6mo ago

> bytes which no one can chew, architecture no one can inhabit, and software which keeps no cold winter wind from anyone's bodies. this hits hard. hopefully we can start making physical stuff again & teaching kids how to do so.

flyinghamster 6mo ago
I was ranting about the demise of American manufacturing as I was entering the workforce forty years ago, and it seems that nothing has improved in that sphere. Sure, dismantling General Electric produced a supernova of shareholder value, but the problem with supernovas is that once they're done, they're done.
- aidenn0 6mo ago
  This piece was written over 30 years ago.
- deepsun 6mo ago
  > One of the more intriguing results of a recent Cato Institute–commissioned poll about trade and globalization was the respondents’ views on manufacturing. When asked whether the country would be better off if more Americans worked in the sector, 80 percent responded in the affirmative. Given widespread perceptions of American industrial decline—very much at odds with available evidence—that’s not entirely surprising. But here’s the interesting part: among those same respondents, just 25 percent stated that they would personally be better off in a factory instead of their current work. It’s a result that holds across class, education, and racial lines. The most enthusiastic group, those aged 18–29, still registered just 36 percent interest in manufacturing employment. Americans love the idea of people working in manufacturing, but most don’t think they would benefit from such work themselves. source: https://www.cato.org/blog/americans-think-manufacturing-employment-greatfor-other-people https://www.cato.org/blog/americans-think-manufacturing-empl...

RickJWagner 6mo ago

“Here, guns were part of the furniture, and my taciturn neighbors used them on one another with heart-breaking regularity. These domestic killers rarely went to jail, since they could usually remind the jury that the deceased, whom most of the jurors knew, needed killing anyway.” It’s enjoyable reading, but I realized the author wasn’t to be taken seriously at this point.

erikerikson 6mo ago
Please explain.
- eks391 6mo ago
  I think he is suggesting that this article is heavily exaggerated, or possibly written more as entrainment rather than to express fact. He quotes the misuse of rule of law to prove his point. Up to you whether you agree. There are lots of examples in American past where mob mentality weighed more than law, so that example doesn't disprove the article for me but I hope it is entertainment instead of fact.
- RickJWagner 6mo ago
  I’ve lived much of my life in the upper Midwest and have close relatives in Wyoming. Nobody behaves like that. Ever. The environment is harsh and people unfailingly help each other. Law and order is respected. The culture is one of independence, but rooted strongly in public good. What the author wrote must surely have been an attempt at humor in the Patrick F. McManus vein.
  - funimpoded 6mo ago
    Can confirm, that kind of thing (murder that the jury decide was OK because they had it coming, or a town collectively deciding and sticking to “we didn’t see nothin’” so a prosecution can’t proceed) happens, but it’s so rare most rural-dwellers never see it anywhere near them in a lifetime. Unless it’s cops covering up for other cops or their pals, but I mean, even that’s not exactly an everyday occurrence (at least at the level of things like murder). Approximately nowhere in the US is this normal among ordinary folks.

mohamedkoubaa 6mo ago

Masterclass in navel gazing

deleted 6mo ago
[deleted]

pwillia7 6mo ago

Reminds me of Wendell Berry or even Cormac Mccarthy's writing. Great piece.

RetroTechie 6mo ago

Insightful, funny, colorful, visionary in places & not a speck of naivety in sight. Well worth the read. "(..) tending to favor the creation of small, fast-moving, short-lived adhocracies...digitized hunter-gatherer groups roaming the steppes of Cyberspace." They're called startups. Or hacker groups, if you will. Not much difference between those 2 imho.

cb321 6mo ago

I think this was written in 1994 for this conference https://seclists.org/interesting-people/1994/Mar/64 https://seclists.org/interesting-people/1994/Mar/64 , but I'm not 100% sure. It refers to "last summer's coup in the Soviet Union" which may also date it. Maybe it should have a (1994) in the title. Or, I don't know, maybe it's from even earlier? Some of the other pieces have nice dates at the bottom, like the Declaration of Independence for Cyberspace a bit over 30 years ago. EDIT: @karel-3d elsethread seems to think this one is (1998).

fredoralive 6mo ago
It would presumably be the August 1991 coup if it were the Soviet Union, as it was one of the factors leading to the USSR dissolving at the end of the year. The Autumn 1993 coup was in the Russian Federation (and the geriatric plotters in the Kremlin kinda won that one). So 1992?
- cb321 6mo ago
  That's what I thought, too, but the top of the article says "For the Conference on HyperNetworking, Oita, Japan" which was in '94. So, I thought maybe "last summer" was internally even off by a couple years? I'm really not sure, but someone around these parts probably knows. Worth mentioning that also in the early 90s people did refer to the Russian Federation as the Soviet Union sometimes as a shortening of "the former Soviet Union". The estimate of "The Internet" connecting 800,000 computers is probably also pretty surgically date-identifying (at least to isolate 1992 to 1998 given how fast it was growing at the time, though estimation error might cause a little trouble!). For example, https://web.mit.edu/people/mkgray/net/internet-growth-summary.html https://web.mit.edu/people/mkgray/net/internet-growth-summar... also suggests 1994 (although that estimate was 0.6 million) while 1992 would be more like 200,000 although as per my scare quotes (and that MIT link) "The Internet" was also a somewhat vague term at the time. And by 1998 it was surely over 10 million which makes the @karel-3d quite likely incorrect, although who knows - maybe that's when the EFF first put it up on their web site? EDIT: I mostly think it matters since observations that might have seemed quite prescient in 1992 (like also-Mormon Orson Scott Card's even more prescient ideas in 1985 Ender's Game with Locke & Demosthenes political chat personas based on 1980s BBS/UUCP network activity) were very much things everyone was saying by 1998.

bpoyner 6mo ago

He's describing my great grandmother's childhood in territorial Arizona, down to the riding a horse to a one-room school house. Her family were all tough ranchers living a lifestyle most of us can't really comprehend.

deleted 6mo ago
[deleted]

layer8 6mo ago

(1992) (See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48136937 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48136937.)

aidenn0 6mo ago

> I believe most of this activity is a giant make-work project designed to keep us out of trouble and on the payroll while Asian robots churn out most of the physical things we really need... Asian, yes. Robots, no (or at least not in the sense of the sci-fi image of one man in a factory whose only job is to press "start" at the beginning of the shift and "stop ad the end of the shift). We didn't abolish the labor, we reduced it a bit and moved it away from us. [edit] Productivity in Asia was even lower when this article was written (no date, but mentions that there are 800,000 computers on the internet).

ynac 6mo ago

Anyone see a link to the audio / video, or better transcription? The text seems to have been transcribed and the typos / mistakes are splitting the intended meanings of things. Some of which seem to be causing misunderstandings in here. (Dialup for the day here, or I'd do it myself)

deepsun 6mo ago

There's no date in it. What it was written?

taneliv 6mo ago
1992 and 1993 are argued in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48136937 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48136937. Article mentions: > That this approach works was demonstrated during last summer's coup in the Soviet Union. I don't think it can mean anything else than the coup attempt in August 1991.

gricardo99 6mo ago

An incredible, lucid, and beautiful depiction of the burgeoning, inchoate world of cyberspace at the time — voicing an anxiety that echoes even louder today: We humans would be liberated into an Elysian condition of permanent leisure. We’d have nothing to do but hang out in our indestructible miracle-fiber jumpsuits and talk philosophy. Only it didn’t happen quite like that. The machines did get many of our physical jobs alright, but no one could quite figure out how to pay us for all that hanging out. What would John make of what’s unfolded since? Much as he envisioned and embraced, humanity poured its imagination, creativity, toil, and love into cyberspace — only for the machines to feed on it all and usher in a new, all-encompassing level of human obsolescence.

deepsun 6mo ago
A good answer: "The Intolerable Hypocrisy of Cyberlibertarianism" [1] And discussion [2]. [1] https://matduggan.com/the-intolerable-hypocrisy-of-cyberlibertarianism/ https://matduggan.com/the-intolerable-hypocrisy-of-cyberlibe... [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48074952 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48074952

01100010x 6mo ago

[dead]

andijati2 6mo ago

[dead]

1vuio0pswjnm7 6mo ago

(2018)

hirvi74 6mo ago

I lived a similar life to this growing up in TN about 16 years or so ago. I didn't necessarily enjoy the labor, the loneliness, etc.. Though, as I age I become more and more thankful for the environment I grew up in. Wrangling horses, dropping trees in the summer for wood for the winter, and all kinds of other arduous tasks. My father grew up on a much larger farm, and I can tell that despite leaving it during his adulthood, he always wanted to return. He made it his life mission to impart as much of his wisdom and knowledge onto me as possible, and that is perhaps what I am most thankful for.

Jimidesuu 6mo ago

You just made me realize once again how huge this world is... The world we live in has multiple perspective and to find it here on HN is actually a way for me to understand that life doesn't just revolve to what's going on around me and I felt that through your words and experience, At the end of the day, we all live and I believe that's how peace of mind comes in when you stop and take a look first at everything

deleted 6mo ago

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AIorNot 6mo ago

This guy was the real most interesting man in the world btw. Read his bio: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Perry_Barlow https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Perry_Barlow

tempaccountabcd 6mo ago

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jgkelley 6mo ago

How did you come upon the essay? Asking as an EFF staff member.