20 Years Since John Perry Barlow Declared Cyberspace Independence
wired.com
wired.com
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.
I'd have struck out for the next frontier years ago if I had any idea where it was.
Meaning it is a variant of "why do you want privacy if you have nothing to hide?" spiel.
Its a bunch of special interest within the M-I-I complex that love the ability to be able to track every conversation in real time 24/7/365.
That they wrap themselves in "think of the X/Y/Z" should be transparent.
But thanks to media playing along with the argument that even touching someone younger than adult (never mind that USA have some of the most conservative age of consent laws) is pedophilia, because it makes for more eyeballs and therefore more ad revenue, the bozos have the perfect argument that bypasses the brain and goes straight for the feels.
Privacy should not have to be defended, it should be the default.
If anybody here is listening, set up an onion service, just for fun. Even if it's just a static page with some content. Make the darknet great again. (I already run one.)
Do the fed customary burn down whole motels because a few of the rooms were used for illegal activities?
The Internet has made finding a frontier to settle in easier than ever.
Once the West was won, America needed raw materials to actually build all the infrastructure. Civilization moves slowly, so there was always opportunity to get out ahead of it and strike it rich. Gold mining, oil prospecting, surveying, offered up a continuous range of gradations of closeness to civilization. You could have worked for the railroad or gone out and, say, ranched or prospected on your own.
You can see these elements in today's Internet frontier. The equivalent of prospecting would be making a Bitcoin startup, those who would have preferred a more civilized life working for the railroad might join an established startup.
The American frontier moved from being geographical to being industrial. It's a different kind of culture and different goals. But the stakes of this frontier were even larger, the benefits that came after the West was won had a much greater impact than the Wild West itself ever did.
And so you see the same with the Internet frontier. If you know what to look for, the civilizing process has only begun, there's still lots and lots of money to make and influence to have. But the pioneers time is over. We need those who can actually build something real.
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.
> high bandwidth
> high distance
The laws of physics compel you to choose 2.
This is not to say that there isn't exciting stuff going on in the QRP DX world (like JT65), but we're not breaking through the power-bandwidth-distance frontier, just finding interesting new ways to trade the three off against each other.
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.
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.
Here is at San Francisco's Ocean Beach: https://twitter.com/JPBarlow/status/692198084265254914
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.
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.
"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.