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Comment by sandworm101 | Hacker News Reader

Off deep end:

>> I declare the planetary 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.

>> Your legal concepts of property, expression, identity, movement, and context do not apply to us. They are all based on matter, and there is no matter here.

Funny, right after disclaiming the concept of property they remember to protect their project with an MIT license ... a concept baked in western IP traditions.

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> Ours is a world that is both everywhere and nowhere, but it is not where bodies live.

Unfortunately, our/their bodies are made of matter, and are subject to laws and government enforcement. That kind of ruins much of the logic of the manifesto.

> We are creating a world where anyone, anywhere may express his or her beliefs, no matter how singular, without fear of being coerced into silence or conformity.

That seems somewhat overstated compared to the reality, in light of recent events (great firewalls, DDOS attacks, and online attacks based on viewpoint).

> We must declare our virtual selves immune to your sovereignty, even as we continue to consent to your rule over our bodies. We will spread ourselves across the Planet so that no one can arrest our thoughts.

Yeah... that "rule over our bodies" turns out to actually affect cyberspace.

To be fair, the manifesto was written in 1996.

>To be fair, the manifesto was written in 1996.

Too soon to judge as we are in a moment of backlash against these trends, lets see how 2196 views the manifesto.

> we are in a moment of backlash against these trends

What makes you think so? As far as I can tell, it's over and the idealists lost.

>As far as I can tell, it's over and the idealists lost.

Could be true, could not be, I don't know. The present often seems like the end of history because it is very difficult to see beyond it.

Some lost cause today will be a dominate ideology tomorrow, with the "nutty-idealists" reframed as visionaries ahead of the curve.

Fun game: if history remembers RMS, what role will he be cast into, what future trends will try to claim or denounce him?

When the Internet was new, there was a perception in some quarters that it was New and old orders were about to be overturned. That's the sentiment reflected in the manifesto.

Now we can see that it was just another medium that would in (short) time come to be dominated by the same forces at play everywhere else. Those particular dreams are dead and they aren't going to be revived now that we know how the Internet is actually used. The Internet revolution has played out. It is now part of the background, just like the printing press.

>When the Internet was new, there was a perception in some quarters that it was New and old orders were about to be overturned.

And they still might be overturned, it is much too early to call it in either direction.

>The Internet revolution has played out. It is now part of the background, just like the printing press.

The Gutenberg printing press was invented in 1440, the protestant reformation didn't start until 1517 (77 years later). The growing impact of the printing press was still being felt 200 years later. Imagine someone writing in 1480 about the printing press being played out.

"People always overestimate the impact of a technology in the short term and underestimate the impact of a technology in the long term."

Perhaps I am overly pessimistic.

Having seen the promise of the early Internet turn into a vehicle of control, surveillance, consumerism, and whatever you want to call Facebook, there is little room left for optimism.

Has it made life easier and more convenient? Yes. Will it empower the oppressed and create a more equitable, a more enlightened world? It sure isn't looking that way.

">> I declare the planetary 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."

That guy is going to have a great 40th Birthday party as his buddies whip that one out, and make him chug a beer for every time someone laughs out loud.

'That guy' is John Perry Barlow who is currently 69. He wrote it 20 years ago when he was 49.

Regardless of how naive (or even misguided) it seems, it's part of the culture of the internet and it's a bit sad that more people on hackernews aren't aware of it.

I'm aware of the culture, and I'm fine with it.

Surely, we benefit from having some people here and there 'rail against big corporations'.

There are granules of truth in it.

But it's the hyperbolic and crazy statements that are funny and spooky.

MIT is pretty much giving the project away. What are you talking about?

If they truly believed, then they wouldn't bother with a license. Someone who truly doesn't care about copyright wouldn't consider they need a license. The irony would be even more should someone break this license and these believers take them to court. I'm reminded of when the Church of Scientology hadn't bothered with registering the copyrights for many texts, only to rush to court once they leaked. They lost, mostly because they were true believers unable to admit the texts were not divinely inspired.

MIT does have stipulations:

"The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software."

They shouldn't believe that shipping a MVP will immediately displace the current legal system in which they are vulnerable to nuisance lawsuits over an implied warranty.

The counterintuitive bit you're pointing out is an artifact of law, not their political opinion. If you don't care about copyright you use a license that protects you from copyright claims while giving rights to others. Companies that rely on public domain or open source software can't legally use the code until it has a suitable license, the absence of a license being that the owner still holds those rights. So the only way to hold their position is to do what they're doing. More broadly they're also saying they don't believe any of this shit is enforceable so they denigrate their own license but provide it for your sake.

absolutely right.. actually we could've gone with a GPL license, yet we want to make sure the greatest degree of freedom is embedded in the rights to use this software and MIT's simple licensing looks like the most fit for that purpose.

GPL provides greater rights to users, MIT provides greater rights to developers. If your purpose was to have the greatest degree of freedom for usage rights, you probably should have gone with GPL.

That's a deft read on their objective here and, I think, an accurate one.

But, it does raise interesting questions regarding whether there are limitations to a system that is ultimately bound by the system that it seeks to disavow/displace.

In the US if you don't put copyright on it, it will default to being the author's copyright and be legally unusable.

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