Stop pretending cyberspace exists

First, on government and the internet. It's true that "most Internet activity takes place in particular territories governed by states ... [as are] users, ... servers, ...", but so what? States are not only trying to govern what is done within their borders, they are trying to govern what is done outside their borders. If I start a server in China, and serve pirated software to users in the UK, a country I have never visited, the UK government will still try to prosecute me. But all the things within the UK are things that do not belong to me and that I do not control! I'm not taking a position here on whether they should or should not.... I'm pointing out that Micheal Lind is encouraging an even dumber mental model than "cyberspace".

And it makes _perfect_ sense to say that California or the US is "extending their jurisdiction “into” cyberspace". It is _not_ the case that they have jurisdiction over everything within their borders. For an extreme and unambiguous example, the US refuses to take -- and forbids California from taking -- jurisdiction over my religious belief. More relevantly, as I understand it, in 1900 the US took no jurisdiction over the movement of gold, and then later they extended their jurisdiction. States (both the kind that the US is, and the kind that California is) do extend their jurisdiction from time to time (and very rarely contract it). Again, Lind is talking nonsense.

As others have pointed out, people complain all the time about corporations invading abstract things. Public spaces, the classroom/academy/etc, your living room, the national news agenda... those are all "spaces" that people have complained about corporations invading, and they're not all literal spaces (and of the ones that are, at most one involves a literal physical presence). Metaphorical invasions, including of non-spatial things. Welcome to the English language, Michael Lind, are you new here? Or just disingenuous and demagogic?

All in all, the bulk of this article is worse than the thing it denounces.

That said, props for the mention of “A Declaration of the Interdependence of Cyberspace”, which I hadn't heard of or read, and which I think is a pretty great rant (even if I think casting aside Article 27.2 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights just might be a good idea).

http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/print/9236603/A_Decla...

Extreme the other way: Cyberspace is a reflection of the world that we live in (kind of like a mirror - it's the same as the 'real' world, but a little bit different). It's real when we want it to be (print out this paragraph, it's now physical), it's a place where thoughts and actions occur, it's the 'coffeehouse' of our generation, where like minded souls can find one another and communicate. I can see pictures and videos of places I've never been to, imagine one day when I get a robot with a holographic camera that I can drive around to places I've never been to - but I might experience it just like I was there. The bridge between 'reality' and 'cyberspace' is strengthening everyday, with more and more people trusting this cyber world. If we all believe hard enough, can we make it just as real as the world we live in?

Cyberspace is an excellent term to cover this otherwise strange notion of real-time interaction with our fellow humans based on an abstraction of their identity and representation of their ideas, rather than geographical distance.

> Let’s start with government and cyberspace. Most Internet activity takes place in particular territories governed by states. The users of the equipment, as well as the infrastructure of servers, wireless towers, and so on, apart from satellites, are physical entities located in sovereign states.

Obviously untrue, since the US will happily claim that a .com can be seized no matter where the servers are; and the US will ask for people to be extradited no matter where those people are (or if they're not breaking any laws in their country) and etc etc.

> Nobody complains that electric utilities are “invading” the Virtual Realm of Electricity by generating and selling power,

I seem to remember plenty of people who were annoyed at Enron for artificially restricting the supply of electricity to create profit - a lot of that criticism fits the "these corrupt profiteers should not raid Electricity" (where electricity was a nebulous concept of generation and delivery).

I also remember a lot of people very annoyed at Russia turning off the natural gas pipes to EU.

One of the reasons that metaphor of "virtual land" isn't as strong for electricity or gas is that those are just much simpler, and people don't do stuff in them, unlike online.

For example, if a man or woman had 1,000,000,000 highly detailed pictures of porn in his/her house and that got reported to the news because they were stacked up on the porch, flying around everywhere, it might make the evening news in a "What a perv!" segment. But if that same person has access to even more pictures than that on the web and views them, they aren't called out on it if it is within the range of acceptable online and offline behavior.

By the same token, I'd post what I think on HN and would say it in person to the same people in a bar having a drink, but I'd never post the same things in an editorial in a newspaper or on a blog. However, on HN everything is public and global. It just isn't the same as the rest of the world, even if in the end it is contained in physical space with real physical people communicating with one another. So we have another term for it.

Our world itself is just as unreal, though. The media and government and even our friends and family just show us part of what is going on, and don't act or communicate as they would if they were being true. This is the reason that both philosophers such as Plato and Socrates differentiated between truth and what we learn in the world, and why popular religions such as Christianity teach us that the world is not truth- that there is something beyond it that we must aspire to.

I agree with this, but at the same time, someone must fight for the internet because information is knowledge, free exchange of information is free exchange of knowledge, and as we all know, knowledge is power.

Here's another argument that is parsed exactly the same way as this CyberSpace one:

"Is all that is good beautiful?" As Wittgenstein would note, wonderful intellectual gymnastics, but you've essentially achieved nothing.

The author doesn't understand the concept of a metaphor. No one believes there is a mystical Narnia of 1s and 0s "somewhere out there" - no one reasonable, whose opinion matters at least.

CyberSpace is a way to visually describe certain perceived catastrophes, such as the internet being consolidated into public domains that restrict user rights - whether or not the catastrophes are valid is a separate debate. CyberSpace itself is a valid framework of looking at internet protocols, communities and basic rights. It doesn't necessitate other views.

The author built a strawman argument by trying to invalidate CyberSpace in the "Fax Space" and "Telephone Space" argument. Okay, those two terms don't port easily, but that's only one nuanced area of discussion. Do you really believe you need to view CyberSpace as some sort of sovereign territory to understand what someone is talking about when they say the government is restricting rights? That's not the point. We know there isn't an internet continent/kingdom/nation/whathaveyou being invaded by a host of other nations trying to use it selfishly. That's missing the point. The real point is, if the government has their way, you could lose the ability to make blog posts like this. That's the reality. And whether or not you agree with this argument, that is the argument - not that the internet is being visualized as a sovereign nation of idealist hackers somewhere.

The author's rant on CyberSpace is simply too literal and completely misses the point. It sounds good at first, but when you examine the real logic behind it, the author is not arguing anything that has ever really been said by notable representatives of internet communities. Taking this article's view on "CyberSpace" to it's logical extrapolation, the article must think people who argue against SOPA and PIPA are ignorant of basic linguistics. But really, the author is just being deliberately obtuse for argument's sake, or is simply ignorant of the fact that analogies are not designed to translate perfectly into concrete descriptions. You can break an analogy by stretching it too far. And this is what the author did in analyzing the use of the term "CyberSpace" - extended it too far (and much farther than it is ordinarily used), and then defeated the argument he constructed.

In meatspace, the economic leverage of a traditional business is scarcity and the leverage of traditional parasitic distribution business is distance. The economics of cyberspace can be based on neither of these things, because once a single instance of something is created, it is everywhere without scarcity. Traditional business attemts to create artificial scarcity and distance, but this is madness.

Usually it's paired with that "doesn't know enough to recognize inadequacy" problem.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2-Hg2Ft0Vtc