Graham’s pushback against the utopian rhetoric of the early internet reminded me of a section of Adam Curtis’s sprawling mindfuck of a documentary, Hypernormalisation (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-fny99f8amM). 35:40 - 46:36 plays right into our discussion.
On the one hand, you have the vision of cyberspace as a place of liberation - a borderless zone influenced by the radical politics and transcendent drug experiences of the 60s. This is exemplified in “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace” by John Perry Barlow. <Interesting wikipedia byline for that guy: American poet and essayist, a cattle rancher, and a cyberlibertarian political activist who had been associated with both the Democratic and Republican parties. He was also a lyricist for the Grateful Dead and a founding member of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Freedom of the Press Foundation.>
A relevant passage reads:
We are creating a world that all may enter without privilege or prejudice accorded by race, economic power, military force, or station of birth.
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.
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.
Barlow’s antagonists are some young punk hackers from a group called Masters of Deception. In a 1989 Harper’s Magazine forum on computers, information, privacy, and electronic intrusion, they mock Barlow’s vision as naive fantasy. And they try to prove their point by publishing Barlow’s credit history, which they’ve dredged from the banking networks- a bit of a shock for the tech-utopist. As Barlow puts it, “To a middle-class American, one's credit rating has become nearly identical to his freedom.”
Curtis sums up the exchange with a question: “..whether Barlowe’s utopian rhetoric about cyberspace might really be a convenient camouflage hiding the emergence of a new and growing power, that was way beyond politics?”
As we swim around this sea of information, our trails, our data, can be a means of corporate and government control. It’s hard for me to shake Curtis’ more dystopian lens. At the same time, the internet is (banal statement forthcoming) a complicated place. There are countless examples of how open access to information and the organizing potential of social media have spawned or fueled liberatory movements. EuroMaidan/Black Lives Matter/current uprisings in Hong Kong- all harness the emancipatory powers of the net in ways that resonate with “A Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace”.
Materials of note:
-A Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace- https://www.eff.org/cyberspace-independence
-This Tribune article detailing the misadventures of the Masters of Deception https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-1992-07-24-9203060830-story.html
-Barlow’s account of the whole altercation: https://www.eff.org/pages/crime-and-puzzlement
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