20 Years Since John Perry Barlow Declared Cyberspace Independence

http://www.wired.com/2016/02/its-been-20-years-since-this-man-declared-cyberspace-independence/

by sinak2 • 10 years ago

122 40 10 years ago

Zikes• 10 years ago

I agree with the message in principle and in spirit, but in order to have an open and free internet we've seen that government involvement is fairly necessary. Net neutrality laws and their enforcement are paramount in order to prevent monopolization of content and information, and government cooperation is necessary in order to build the infrastructure necessary to deliver the internet to people's homes.

"You are not welcome among us" sends the wrong message, I think. I would rather they embraced a free and open internet, and were convinced of the value of keeping it so.

Blackthorn• 10 years ago

Well, I think we all recognize now that the original message was a bit, ah, naive. But that's okay! Missions change with the time and as we learn.

jcoffland5• 10 years ago

When you declare what "we all recognize" you are bound to be wrong. I still fully agree with the original naive statement as it was written.

jcoffland5• 10 years ago

The issue of net neutrality sits on the boarder of cyber and meatspace. Governments are involved because we are talking about the quality of Internet service a particular physical locations. It could become a moot point if global wireless became a reality.

Kinnard• 10 years ago

Wonder who's gonna write this for the Blockchain.

natrius2• 10 years ago

Blockchains don't need independence from governments. Blockchains are independence from governments. Blockchains allow individuals to enforce rules on their governments without needing to navigate bureaucracies and legislatures that are already captured by the wealthy and powerful.

Inalienable rights are a powerful concept. It suggests that there can be rights that people aren't using—not because they don't have them, but because they don't know they have them. This was the story of the Enlightenment, and I believe it's the story of blockchains as well.

Blockchains give the people information about their economy that they can use to see the flow of economic power, and they can use this information to decide whose power to submit to. No one can take this right away. Rejecting power used to require a violent revolution. Soon it'll only require an app.

http://meritcapitalism.com/

prutschman• 10 years ago

My understanding is that blockchains are designed to ensure that it would be economically irrational to attempt to expend resources competing with the blockchain, creating create a stable equilibrium in which rational participants cooperate.

It might not be worth a scammer's money to buy enough computing power to double-spend, but that doesn't mean a government mightn't find it worthwhile to spend money to tamper with or destroy something it perceives as a threat.

oniMaker3• 10 years ago

The message is probably one we can all get behind in principle.

However, the internet has a real, physical infrastructure that is definitely owned and operated by behemoth organizations like governments and private corporations. In fact, the Internet was created by a government. What makes you think they'd give it up willingly?

If you want to create your own internet, you certainly can. But even if you find the monetary resources to do so, you'll need to house and operate the telecommunications equipment somewhere on Earth (or in LEO). And if you want to protect that equipment from hostile takeover, then you'll need some form of recognized sovereignty including a real military capable of defending your castle.

Cyberspace cannot (yet) escape the real bounds of physical reality. It seems as though some people think of it as a superset of the world, while it very much is still a subset dependent on its corporeal parent.

jcoffland5• 10 years ago

Think very long distance wireless. It has yet to be invented but I believe one day it will be possible to communicate point-to-point across the globe with low power devices at high bandwidths. Such a technology would make these arguments moot. Certainly we have to be practical about our present situation but the broader idea of cyberspace is not limited to current technology. In 1996 moderates would have laugh if you suggested today's technology would become common place.

oniMaker3• 10 years ago

Where would you house the wireless endpoints? How would you obscure their source? These aren't magical devices. They're still real-world physical objects.

GuiA• 10 years ago

low power
high bandwidth
high distance

The laws of physics compel you to choose 2.

sevensor2• 10 years ago

There are some severe physical limitations to work around here. Higher frequencies support higher bandwidth, but they tend to go right through the ionosphere rather than treating the ground-ionosphere system as a waveguide. Lower frequencies can propagate further (like AM radio at night), but as you drop the frequency there's suddenly a lot less spectrum to go around. And you need huge antennas.

throwaway2380• 10 years ago

What about techniques that obscure the source of information?

Whether it be something like Tor, or something like a distributed database, internet communication may require hardware and physical location of data, but there are ways to allow information transmission without being strongly reliant on a fixed physical source.

Also, this capability is not limited to the internet.

oniMaker3• 10 years ago

None of those technologies are bulletproof. Tor can be (and at least partially has been) compromised.

Animats• 10 years ago

Well, that didn't work out.

Back in the 1930s, there was a similar enthusiasm about air travel. Watch H. G. Wells "Things to Come".[1] "Wings over the World", indeed.

There was a repeat of this in the Space Age, ("We came in peace for all mankind") but that didn't last long.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kn76zoYjr4k

rayiner2• 10 years ago

There is always a lot of enthusiasm about technology that is ultimately tempered by cold hard reality. When I grew up in the 1990's, computers in the classroom were going to change education. But that idea is a farce today. Same thing with space travel, supersonic flight, nuclear power, etc. The landscape is littered with the bones of techno-optimist dreams from the 1980's and 1990's.

edward2• 10 years ago

John Perry Barlow is recovering from a stroke.

Here is at San Francisco's Ocean Beach: https://twitter.com/JPBarlow/status/692198084265254914

knotty66• 10 years ago

I think he had a heart attack, not a stroke.

edward2• 10 years ago

Sorry, you're right. My mistake.

shmerl• 10 years ago

It's always interesting to see how various companies attempt to go against these ideas and fail. Geoblocking for instance goes against the borderless idea mentioned there. The core of their failure is always the attempt to use physical logic in the digital space. Some just never learn.

vinceguidry3• 10 years ago

Every frontier eventually gets integrated into civilization. It's only a matter of time. Civilization brings its laws and its infrastructure and its masses of people. As civilization is bigger than the frontier, the frontiersmen either have to civilize themselves, or move on to another frontier.

The nice thing about the Internet is that it is particularly hard to civilize. It's incredibly hard to wrap laws, which have to be enforced, around information technology. There is always more information than there is people to look at it. So the Internet offers an "endless frontier" of sorts. The Chinese government is famously grappling with this.

Such a thing is not unprecedented, there are plenty of arenas where there is always going to be room for intrepid settlers to voyage to and scrape out an individualistic experience in. Academia is such a place. Doesn't matter how civilized the university gets, there is always room for more people pushing the boundaries of institutionalized knowledge.

We should welcome society into the Internet. Powerful ideas are bigger than even society, so the Internet will forever remain a place where good ideas thrive. It is society that will be changed by the Internet, not the Internet by society. Society will make its settlements, and people fearful of the rough frontier lifestyle will cling to these settlements, but it won't keep them safe from the powerful ideas generated further out.

rayiner2• 10 years ago

At the same time, the larger civilization is changed even as it integrates the frontier. American culture changed enormously as it integrated the frontier territories, Texas, and California.

marssaxman2• 10 years ago

I was always happy to welcome individual people into Internet society, but after offline society swamped us, there really isn't an Internet society anymore, and I miss it.

I'd have struck out for the next frontier years ago if I had any idea where it was.

Raphmedia• 10 years ago

Tor and the "deep web" was a nice frontier to play with until it got reduced to its current state (pedophilia and drugs).

vinceguidry3• 10 years ago

The world has frontiers for days. Everywhere society isn't, is a frontier. Every idea has a fringe of people that are out on the edges of that idea. Bitcoin, weight-lifting, Indian-Mexican fusion cuisine, van-dwelling. All these things have groups of people that operate outside of the norm, who have made sacrifices to exist more strongly in that space.

The Internet has made finding a frontier to settle in easier than ever.

jbpetersen• 10 years ago

You might be looking for the culture that surrounds state of the art networking tech.

contingencies• 10 years ago

China has been my new frontier, though I must confess it too is becoming a lot less frontier-like these days. Corners of Burma, India, South America, Indonesia and the Philippines. Papua New Guinea.

20 Years Since John Perry Barlow Declared Cyberspace Independence

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