Leaving the Physical World
eff.org
eff.org
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.
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?
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.
Yes, it has downsides too, as economy and people resources work depending on scale - smaller community is going to be smaller - but it's a way to startup and build a base solution, while thinking of something else that may change the rest of the world later.
Of course, yeah, in the end it's just different...
P.S. I'm in same boat technology wise. It's difficult to learn everything, and learn it "on time" :)
Looks like it's being slowly taken away from us to make a few billionaires into proper trillionaires. Can't see this ending well for humanity.
And the common advice you hear on this site ("just migrate to country X") doesn't really apply to most of us. Even if you can name many examples of people doing just that, you're seeing a very narrow slice of the population; I can find many more counterexamples for each one of them.
Your weak passport won't impress anybody, almost all of the world is closed to you, you can't travel anywhere (forget migrate) without going through a lengthy and expensive process where you're treated with suspicion, and can be denied with no compensation, on every step of the way. I'm still talking about traveling here; finding work is much more difficult.
So it's really hard to move anywhere decent if you're not at the top of your profession, which in large part depends on your innate abilities, not just how many hours you put in.
I've become jaded and extremely cynical; if worst comes to worst, there's always one universal way out, which is what keeps me going for now.
And your English seems fine.
90s / early 2000s internet was awesome though.
My English is also a constant work in progress. I depend on standard Google Translate for about 30~40% of what I communicate. For now, I'm making ends meet by doing Upwork job via an agency. It's an uphill battle, but I am determined to push myself to study more by reading English tech articles moving forward
Remember also that if you’re having an atypical experience you likely have a different perspective on the world, and what it needs, than others do. That different way of looking at things could turn out to be very valuable.
We already see things like tiny house movement taking off (lots of young people even building these tiny homes themselves). As older farmers retire/die, now is a good time for younger folks to get into farming, even if it is too damn hard these days for small farmers.
The reasons I had for leaving were manifold, but the big two were wanting to quit Adderall and having read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. It’s a hard road to live a life in which I want to maximize the /quality/ of my minute-to-minute experience. It involves being very honest with myself about what I want to and don’t want to be doing. I know I want to look at a screen for work like I want a hole in the head.
If you want to jump into the physical world, become a janitor. The work is surprisingly satisfying. You spend all day fixing tangible problems that increase everyone’s quality of life.
I don‘t think it‘s terribly relevant today, but why beat around the bush? Let‘s call it how we mean it:
Poor.
Right, and Korea is so incredibly-not "third world" that there's literally an armed border chopped across it dividing the extremely-First part from the extremely-Second part.
In fact, I don't think there's a single third-world country (cold-war definition) anywhere within 2,000 miles.
This honestly brings me hope in a sort of fantasy way. I want to do this, but I do not have the courage to do it.
> The reasons I had for leaving were manifold, but the big two were wanting to quit Adderall
This hits even harder for me. I desire this too, but it's a necessary evil so long as I remain in tech.
Are you on it because you need it for who you are, or are you on it because you need it to meet the expectations of your employer?
Who I am is functionally disordered based on the societal expectations of how people should behave. Employer expectations of behavior are often harsher than societal expectations in some ways.
It's like what Franz Kafka said, "I was ashamed of myself when I realized life was a masquerade party, and I attended with my real face."
I was eventually given a mask to cover up who I am, and I have worn it for far too long. The rat race with no cheese at the end, the 'professionalism,' the 'career development', and all the theatrical and ceremonial bullshit. Setting myself on fire to keep others warm. Killing myself from the inside out with a poison to please others.
I am just so sick of it all. And most importantly, I am sick of pretending that I am not.
But I feel very scared, and sort of stupid and ungrateful, to be considering taking a job with worse hours and benefits for a 1/4 of the pay.
For me though the peace and presence of mind is nigh invaluable. Because I’m working on something that doesn’t make me depressed, I get to be grateful in all of the little moments of the day. I work with brass-tacks people who do a good job and go home. I don’t have to pretend to like anyone. I spend a lot more time outside. My skills are useful wherever I go, and more likely to be directly useful to loved ones. I don’t need a gym membership. I find myself to be a lot more present and unbothered. My time outside of work is truly my own, an even though I am often more physically tired I’m able to show up better for my family and friends.
When it comes to “physical” jobs, do consider the downsides though. For me, paramedic would be a bad fit because I don’t think I could get over hearing the siren so often. There’s a reason nurses are often “mean”, the job requires a very thick skin.
Hah, first time I hear this piece of advice, but I totally buy it.
But... why are you here on this orange website? Isn't a part of you longing for the ones and zeroes still?
The authors point though is that “quality” can never be a scientifically found thing. Yet it completely dominates our real experience. Even an amoeba has a sense of quality, in that if you drop alcohol in the Petri dish it will expend all of its effort to get away. Humans have a more complicated and diverse sense of quality. We like rain and sunsets and crackling fire and dogs and right angles and clean sheets.
To me the book is an argument for caring deeply about your own sense of quality. To listen intently to that subconscious and illogical part of you that screams “this is good, that is bad”. All of our intelligence and smarts should be used to better align ourselves with what our body knows is good and bad, not the other way around.
For me, to operationalize this meant becoming sober, working with my hands in the physical world to solve real problems, pursuing/allowing my gay feelings, and trying as hard as I can to take everything in life with grace and humor.
10 years ago I used to be the worst kind of pedantic know-it-all asexual druggie who spent all day inside programming useless things and playing video games. I wasn’t pursuing quality. I was pursuing the comfort of never having to leave my tiny existence. Now I’m doing something else.
One thing I've noticed is that it fuels people with a sense of self-righteousness that will alienate you from everyone around you (you're basically on weak meth) but you won't notice how much you're pissing them off because you're personally happy. Everything you do is going to seem like the right thing to do. You'll save the world and not care how many women or children you kill to make it happen.
- One of my stepdaughter's friends was on it and got exiled from their friend group for vague "aggression."
- My wife was on it for a decade. She outright abused it, taking the whole bottle in a week. It was worse than living with a coked-up psychopath; she would stay awake for days stealing, trespassing, starting home renovations (and I am being specific in saying "starting"), starting arguments, smashing my things during those arguments, assaulting me while I was asleep later that night, then sleeping the rest of the month. To this day I fear going to sleep.
- My best friend of 20 years got on it, embraced predatory feminism as a dating strategy and tried to convince my wife that she was in an abusive relationship, establishing himself as a safe space. Unfortunately for him, she was sober by then. We are no longer friends. She and I are still married. He is still a virgin.
Like cocaine in the 80s, I have a feeling Adderall has fueled a lot of the insanity since 2000.
I'm taking baby doses of methylphenidate, keeping a strict diet (no sugar, coffee, white bread or ultra processed junk) and exercising regularly. I'm also skipping meds on weekends to give my brain some time to rest. But yeah, I know that eventually I'll have to start taking higher doses and that scares me a bit. Hopefully I'll be able to achieve my goals before that.
Adderall made all of this worse for me, and is itself a stumulant. These days I try not to have more than 1 cup of coffee.
I was driving on a work trip in the rural regions of my country passing a railway crew. They were replacing the tracks I had been laying there as part of a crew some 15 years ago. I liked the outdoors, being middle of the literal nowhere middle of a bright summer knight, the manual labour, the fact that you were constantly up against the elements, even the rain, cold, scorching heat. I didn’t own a smart phone back then and little use it would have been with no connection. So I know a little bit what Barlow writes about.
Now I earn my weeks salary laying down railway tracks by driving 250km to punch bunch of digits into a machine to make it connect to a network and then driving back. The great planes were taken over by robber barons, oil titans, mining companies, the Rockefellers and Hearsts, the Electronic Frontier is now filled with barbed wire and information mines by the new Cyber Industrialists of the likes of Zuck, Bezos, Altman, Musk. Barlow is a Marlboro man of the Electronic Good Ole Days gone past.
I don’t really have a point. You can still go and run in the rain or snow, you can carve things out wood or fix things with your own hands. You can remove yourself - you must - from these virtual madhouses Meta etc. shove your face constantly and try to find your own tribe elsewhere. You can install Linux on old machine and start coding your own tools in C or Python without language models doing your thinking for you. The world is full of great books and great art accessible 24/7 for free, if you know where to look for.
You can be free still. But lamenting after the last cowboy won’t help. We must accept that we live in two worlds constantly today. Schizoid as it might be, having our toes dug into the moist dirt might keep us sane in the maddening glass world of the virtual casino the world has become.
No, this is wrong.
Get your head down. Learn fundamentals. Practice and develop real skills. Ignore anyone saying this is irrelevant now. Let them talk, keep learning and building stuff, while using the new tools.
Give it a few years and you'll find the narrative has changed again, meanwhile you've got a few more years of experience under your belt. Avoid the noise and just focus on building.
There will also be a lot of companies failing, so the economical landscape and job market might not be too well off, though. Nobody knows nothing.
Why would you envy the opportunity to believe in a fiction that has been shown to be wrong, and that exacerbated the problems that the guy is trying to escape from in the first place?
Liberatingly, this is not true anymore for most of programming. The “difficulty” of getting from idea to product is collapsing fast, benefitting anyone who wants to build something (that people want).
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-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.
edit: earliest web archive crawl is from 1996
https://web.archive.org/web/19961220120042/https://www.eff.o...
so you are probably right with 1994
Three internal anchors line up tightly on 1992:
- EFF's age. Barlow writes that EFF, "after almost two years of operation," now thinks of itself as building "the united Mind of Humanity." EFF was founded July 10, 1990, so "almost two years" puts the writing at roughly spring/early summer 1992.
- "Last summer's coup in the Soviet Union." The August 1991 Moscow coup. Read naturally, "last summer" was written sometime between fall 1991 and the end of summer 1992.
- Internet size. Barlow says the Internet "connects some 800,000 (mostly UNIX) computers." Per RFC 1296, the host count was 727,000 in January 1992 and reached ~992,000 by July 1992. 800,000 sits squarely in spring 1992.
He also doesn't mention Mosaic, which launched in January 1993 — by 1993 it was almost a reflex in Barlow's writing — which is weak supporting evidence that this predates that release.
“Two years later [after the first conference in 1990], I was invited back, along with John Barlow […].” “[…] which explains why I was invited to Oita in 1990, and why Barlow, Johansen, and Johnson-Lenz were invited to join me there in 1993.”
While 1992 vs. 1993 is still ambiguous (either 1993 is a typo, or the invitation was two-and-something years later), the text confirms that there was a second HyperNetwork conference in Oita in either 1992 or 1993, and that Barlow was invited to it.
EDIT: Another source: https://www.eff.org/pages/complete-acm-columns-collection
“Will Japan Jack In? For the October, 1992 Electronic Frontier column in Communications of the ACM by John Perry Barlow […] At a conference on globally networked computing in Oita Prefecture in February, I was astonished to hear a number of Japanese corporate officials […] proclaim enthusiastically the potential of the "Hypernetwork"[…].”
This would imply that there was a Hypernetwork-related conference in Oita in February 1992 that Barlow attended.
> After a disorienting visit from the FBI in May of 1990, I wrote a rant called Crime and Puzzlement, which led to my establishing with Mitch Kapor (who had previously founded Lotus Development Company) an organization called the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
> Now, after almost two years of operation...
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.
I use the phrase "there's a boomer in every room," to describe the phenomenon. Always taking up space, never knowing when to shut up. Always working out a way to make it about him. I'd say it equally applies to post author and the person you responded to. There's no teaching them otherwise, complaining is pointless, hence my response.
"Like very few Americans of my generation, I come from the physical world. ...earning a living from things I could touch and smell."
What is the majority of the workforce doing, then? People working in fast food, welders, plumbers, carpenters, laborers, people working in slaughterhouses, janitors, cooks, waitstaff, the people working at the grocery store and gas station, people that stay at home and take care of their children? All of them are demoted from reality? Can't touch or smell any of that? Poor struggles in the city don't count?
I forced myself through several more paragraphs before I let myself post, but could barely keep my rolling eyes on the text. "We, we, we..." We were the toughest, the hardest, the roughest. The unstated implication being that the rest of us soft, inner-city, fake Americans could never relate to the realness. Blah, blah, blah. How about some humility, things have been pretty tough and unfair and extreme and real for a lot of people in a lot of places. People have real relationships and peculiarities wherever they might live.
I don't know, maybe the article goes further than that, but I couldn't force any more of it down.
While I think he's pretty obviously speaking to an audience of office workers, I'll point out that there's a significant difference between cooking or building something a thousand times per day and shipping it out versus seeing the ongoing function of something you made with your own hands.
I've worked in food service, and I've done metal fabrication as a hobby. I can say that I get ongoing satisfaction from using something that I've invented and built with my own hands, versus all those sandwiches and fried foods that I passed to customers.
I've occasionally lamented that I didn't pursue civil engineering instead of software. Most or all of the software that I wrote for companies has disappeared from the world. I believe that I would've taken great satisfaction from seeing a bridge or other infrastructure that I might've had a hand in creating.
Absolutely false.
Just because a cook does something multiple times a day doesn’t mean...
Strawman. Regardless, I can assure you that most food service work does not meet some Jiro Dreams of Sushi ideal.
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.
And discussion [2].
[1] https://matduggan.com/the-intolerable-hypocrisy-of-cyberlibe...
this hits hard.
hopefully we can start making physical stuff again & teaching kids how to do so.
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-empl...
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).
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.
"(..) 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.
Read his bio: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Perry_Barlow
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.
It’s enjoyable reading, but I realized the author wasn’t to be taken seriously at this 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.
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.
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
edit: so 1994