A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace (1996)
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eff.org
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.
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.
Now there are millions of choices to be made every single day, all at one's fingertips, and it's just so much. Should I read this or that? Which of the gazillion movies and series, on umpteen streaming services, do I want to watch? Etc etc. In comparison, tv-zapping was cognitively trivial: just cycle through channels until you get bored, no need to reason about your wishes and inclinations.
Today.. Well I don't even have to leave my desk. On one hand, I get what I want that much easier. It's still a sort of magic, but it's not the same.
The issue now isn't scarcity so much as abundance, avoiding apps designed to be addicting and distracting, and being able to sort through the massive amount of information to find the high value stuff that's really great.
If you're a kid growing up without parents to help pull stuff out of the 'unknown unknowns' then it's hard to dig through things to find the good stuff.
I supposed I'm a little more optimistic - I think a lot of kids are interested, it's just a firehose (and there's a lot of easily accessible junk food designed by highly paid devs to make it as 'engaging' as possible).
The average citizen shouldn't need college level statistics and logical fallacy training to lead a comparably normal/healthy life.
But maybe there is an argument to be made to completely revamp k-12 with the sole goal of training people to be able to discern good and bad information.
Its not easy, plenty of professorial researchers fall for some of the same traps.
I'm confused by the word "virtually" here.
Does Project Gutenberg + libgen house everything that can be accessed through university subscriptions (Elsevier, etc.) and Google books/scholar?
All of these are free for anyone to access and contribute.
The social-media dominated Internet of today is the polar opposite; it's very explicitly trying to make cyberspace as thin a layer as possible onto ordinary meatspace, because this is how large social media firms can maximize short-term "growth", "engagement" and advertising profits. This could even be acceptable on its own terms, but these large social media sites tend to be sources of spillover that affects even the formerly more independent Internet, and reduces its effectiveness quite a lot compared to what it could be.
It's not all black and white, though. The amount of knowledge available at, say, youtube, is still absolutely mind-bogglingly vast. Imagine learning to flint knap in the 90s, good luck if you can't get access to one of the very few experimental archaeologists who are able to teach this; now there are entire courses on youtube, free for all.
And all those tools and knowledge on how to collaborate on very short cycle times in a massively distributed fashion, I'm absolutely certain that helped a lot tackling Covid-19 (like, with vaccine development and production, treatment research, logistics, etc.)
But Youtube in particular is a service open to everyone with the barrier of entry being access to an old-ish smartphone. In very large parts of the world, that's almost everyone by now, though not everyone will get 4k quality. I can look up how to fix my bike, how to make Austrian Backhendl from scratch, to what neutron stars are made of and how exactly the physics work, even lectures by great minds in the field, and all of this has grown pretty much organically. As someone who has had to rely on local libraries exclusively because it was the 90s and there was no internet to speak of, I think that's absolutely amazing. Wikipedia is amazing, archive.org is amazing, all the millions of niche encyclopedias are amazing, PubMed and arXiv are amazing, and Google and friends are amazing and profoundly revolutionary, even with all their problems.
But you also require this to be non-proprietary, and to run on commodity tech and even more economically sustainable than Youtube, and free of low-quality content – even books can't offer that. Printing at scale is not commodity tech at all, publishing houses are extremely proprietary in every way, gatekeep to the extreme, still publish a lot of junk, pretty much anything niche is fighting to remain afloat, cheap modern paperback paper doesn't last like vellum did, and while there are public libraries in most places, these aren't sustainable on their own, they're funded by the public.
Still, books have been central to an intellectual and cultural revolution without equal, and I wouldn't discount them just on their not-libre-enough-ness. Same goes for the present-day internet – yes, there's an awful lot of junk, dark patterns, centralization, what-have-you – but internet for the masses is merely two decades old, and most people haven't even grasped its fundamentals yet, and if you don't see past the problems, you miss the fire-and-printing-press revolutionary technology and cultural leap part, and that would be a shame.
I think economic sustainability of content creation is orthogonal to the hosting problem. Crowdfunding, like you say, could work, independently of the platform. I see lots of YouTube channels I follow use Patreon, for example.
The declaration is noble but it feels too much like an almost mythical unifying spirit that pushes humanity to some perceived enlightened perfection. To be fair the previous enlightenment suffered that same problem. Individuals will pursue matters that satisfy both the real and perceived needs. The desire to push humanity towards more noble intentions is good but needs to factor the human level.
The reality is that 99.99% of the people are interested in posting selfies or short videos to some data-harvesting app and do not mind the intrusion for their privacy. Humans in the Internet are like monkeys living in a first-world developed city.
Are you sure? There's certainly lots of "tragic" stuff in the internet today. But I don't think that, even in their wildest dreams, the first users of the internet who hoped for a fantastic future could fathom the current enormity of sci-hub, library genesis and wikipedia.
I'm sure there is more if one thinks carefully enough, the internet is wonderful memory, but it's _memory_, it _will_ fail you at some point or another. Distribution merely decreases the probability of faliure, but any arbitarily small probability can be made arbitarily large by multiplying by enough population size.
I sat on a bench which had a plaque on it. It was a memorial to Malcolm Jeffries who died on his birthday in 1974 aged 20 years. His birth day and month was not mentioned.
I felt like this was an event, something notable and I wanted to know more about it. I searched the web but so far I haven't found anything.
I'm not really challenging you, I guess I'm just saying that a lot of "knowledge" hasn't made it to the web and likely never will.
It is a user generated database of memorial benches. It doesn't seem to include the bench you're after. If you happened to take a photo of the inscription you could add it yourself.
What a pity.
Still, at least Sci-Hub and Libgen exist.
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.
Instead we have entered a “fog of war” situation where it’s almost impossible to figure out what’s happening. Add to that the new practices of online cult indoctrination (“pilling”) and you now have tons of bad faith sophistry on top of all that bad faith propaganda. Online popular intellectuals now “hide their power level” in a gamified quest to indoctrinate people.
I’ve been predicting for a while that at some point civilization will be forced to make lying illegal. To knowingly state a falsehood that is not clearly labeled as fiction or satire would be a felony subject to large fines and loss of access to certain media for corporations and/or prison sentences for people.
The reason this has never been done is the thorny problem of determining truth, but at some point we might be forced to either go there or shut off the net. There will be a ton of collateral damage and chilling effects, but I wonder if the choice is between this and death by suffocation in bullshit.
A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace (1996) - 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 - Feb 2018 (3 comments)
A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9240106 - March 2015 (20 comments)
"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.
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 - 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.
Only two comments:
(1) I only want to emphasize that at every stage, we had choices. Network effects are powerful, perhaps even irresistible, but still subject to free choice.
(2) Spam and blacklists... that's a tougher thing. But there are plenty of options (like fastmail, I think) that never violated anyone's privacy. Most of us still use gmail.
I should clarify, because I kinda took the coward's way out with all the "we" stuff: I use Gmail, Facebook, YouTube, Netflix, Amazon, and even use an iPhone and MacBook despite all the limitations and lack of freedoms that come with every single one of them. I choose them freely, which says a lot about how much I think I value freedom versus how much I actually do in practice.
I use fastmail (with my own domain) and hardest part about the switch from gmail was going through all the crappy website account flows to change email (some of which are impossible).
I dropped FB last year after painstakingly deleting every post/like/photo, but I still use twitter (though I do delete old stuff after a retention period around 1yr - this is easy to do for tweets, but hard to do for likes so I stopped liking stuff).
I think Amazon is really great and still use them, same for Netflix. YouTube I use because there's no real alternative, but I pay for premium to at least avoid ads (though can't avoid the tracking).
Apple hardware is arguably the best available option for aligned incentives/privacy. In theory you could throw ubuntu on a thinkpad (I did this for college years among others like Arch), but the experience is bad and the security is likely worse.
I play around with Urbit and it's surprisingly usable - it also feels like old school internet from when I was young. Strangers hanging out on forums or chat and enjoying the shared experience of being online. The nature of people interested in Urbit brings some of that back.
The problem is that dreaded network effect. We can choose differently, but if all your friends choose the walled garden, you're left out in the cold. No one's forcing you to do anything, but it sure gets lonely, doesn't it? So we follow the crowd.
But we can start the exodus any time we want, and maybe others will follow. Maybe when enough of us do so, we'll reach a tipping point and the network effects can work to our benefit.
https://groups.google.com/g/comp.org.eff.talk/c/hKpYrKXM-40/...
This sort of reality only becomes true if we all use cryptographic measures all the time perhaps.
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.
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.
You can pretend to be a citizen of the internet but the police will still come after you in meat space.
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.
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.
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/
Tech workers union thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27581962
Mnot's Next Layer of the Internet thread: 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].
*Update:typos
https://faroutmagazine.co.uk/grateful-dead-recordings-14566-...
"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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.