In the past few months, I've been troubled by one specific part of the Declaration, in the final paragraph:
> We will create a civilization of the Mind in Cyberspace. May it be more humane and fair than the world your governments have made before.
Specifically, I think the cyberspace civilization, to the extent that it exists, has been a failure lately on "humane" in the broad sense. The author of the linked post might say that this has to do with the need for moderation (indeed this is a big surprise from the 1996 point of view, as there were still unmoderated Usenet groups that people used regularly and enthusiastically, and spam was a recent invention).
I think there are lots of other things going on there over and above the moderation issue, but one is that the early Internet culture was very self-selected for people who thought that the ability to talk to people and the ability to access information were morally virtuous. I was going to say that it was self-selected for intellectualism but I know that early Internet participants were often not particularly scholarly or intellectually sophisticated (some of our critics like Langdon Winner, quoted here, or Phil Agre, were way ahead on that score).
So, I might say it was self-selected in terms of people who admired some forms of communicative institutions, maybe like people whose self-identity includes being proud of spending time in a library or a bookstore, or who join a debate club. (Both of those applied to me.) This is of course not quite the same thing as intellectual sophistication.
People were mean to each other on the early Internet, but ... some kind of "but" belongs here. Maybe "but it was surprising, it wasn't what they expected"? "But it wasn't what they thought it was about"?
Nowadays "humane" feels especially surprising as a description of an aspiration for online communications. It's kind of out the window and a lot of us find that our online interactions are much less humane that what we're used to offline. More demonization of outgroups, more fantasies of violence against them, more celebration of violence that actually occurs, more joy that one's opponents are suffering in some way. (I see this as almost fully general and not just a pathology of one community or ideology.)
I'm troubled by this both because it's unpleasant and even scary how non-humane a lot of Internet communities and conversation can be, and because it's jarring to see Barlow predict that specific thing and get it wrong that way. Many other things Barlow was optimistic about seem to me to have actually come to pass, although imperfectly or sometimes corruptly, but not this one.
Only someone who's lost the plot (or arrived late) would summarily conflate Barlow's 1996 Declaration with "one of those sovereign citizen TikToks where someone in traffic court is claiming diplomatic immunity under maritime law". The article itself has fallen victim to the weaponized co-optation whose framework it describes.
The author says "I remember thinking it was genius when I first read it. I was young enough [...]", believing it was due to being impressionable, but it's more likely that it was due to having lost something along the way. Or rather, it was stolen from them and they didn't even realize.
The Declaration was right, it was just naively optimistic and severely underestimated its opponent + incorrectly presumed digital natives would automatically be on the "right" side. Now we are where we are. And it's just the beginning of the pendulum's counterswing.
Honestly I think it mostly self selected based on who had the technical ability to participate, especially at that time.
Would that it were so.
Semi-connected rant: What happened to so many startups to kill the mood was the pattern of: Do something technically legal (or technically illegal!) in a way that seems fixable at first, scale to huge size to get lawyers and lobbyists, pivot to strongly supporting government efforts to rein in "lawlessness" or "combat fraud" or "protect children", and then entrench oneself as the status quo while authoring or suggesting legislation to raise a moat against any competitors that might newly start up. PayPal, Facebook, Airbnb, Uber, and others tried this. Backpage and e-gold are unsuccessful examples of the same strategy.
The pendulum swings I suppose…
You don't think hotels should have to follow rules about how they keep their properties, or require their tenants to follow local ordinances? (AirBnB)
You don't think it should be illegal to be someone's sole employer, have full and total control over their schedule and duties, and yet treat them for legal and tax purposes as if they're a contractor? (Uber, et al)
'Cause if you're the type of person who believes that laws and regulations like these shouldn't exist, you are 100% part of the problem, and you are (much like the rest of us) only able to live the kind of life you do because of the existence of such laws and regulations, so your desire to remove them is just a matter of pulling up the ladder behind yourself writ large.
I was able to find my way around okay with paper maps--but I still prefer having GPS in my phone.
My issue with those passages is that the author is conflating "digital" or "computers are involved" with "Internet". They're not the same.
Worth pointing out how this too is an example of somewhat mistaken value analysis based on libertarian ideals.
The market winning solution, of course, is to put THE entire music library, all of it, everyone's, in the cloud and get to it from any device anywhere.
Obviously you perceive value in the local storage that the rest of the market does not. Which was one of the points of the linked article.
lots of people perceive higher quality media as having value, in fact there are markets for those people, just not the largest market which values convenience more.
The ability to browse music is very powerful.
I lost my 1 Soundgarden CD 20 years ago. Now I can listen to all their albums.
You can do the entire Beatles catalogue <- this is a different form of listening.
Discover artists I would never have otherwise heard of.
It has it's downsides, but I dont think CD was 'better'.
We just have an imperfect situation.
https://www.cnet.com/culture/blu-ray-victory-means-royalties...
https://blu-raydisc.info/flla-faq.php
> Instead of what - vast data centres full of electronics, consuming huge quantities of electricity, controlled by techno-feudalistic megacorps who keep almost all of the money and supply a pittance to the artists?
So what's your alternative, stocking every single video store in the country with plastic discs with DRMs transported by diesel trucks? Do you seriously think the material cost of manufacturing and transporting a disc is less than what it takes to send its contents over the internet?
I use streaming services. I like the flexibility and ubiquity of access. But my favourite music I still buy on cd or vinyl. Why? Because it means I’m not subject to the whims of a megacorp removing access and it means more goes to the artist. I’ve been buying music for 40 years and still listen to some of stuff I bought then. I hope to live long enough to do the same for the music I buy now.
Storing data of any kind in plastic as opposed to silicon metal seems like a meaningless distinction that only comes about from imagining that there is some disembodied, ethereal and platonic notion of digital “data” which is decoupled from any physical substrate. everything is always materialized and mediated through some complex, and probably vaguely arcane, geologically extractive process in some way.
"I have a CD player in my home, a VCR in a closet. But I’m also inclined to think about the work that older devices demand of a person compared with the frictionless present day, when we are told that any and all content is at our fingertips (a myth, but a myth that sells.) And I can’t help but think of the reality that there are many significantly larger and more consequential inconveniences that Americans, plainly, do not have the heart or stomach for. One example might be the inconvenience caused by a mass political uprising, one that risks the security, safety, and comfort of its participants. I have seen glimpses of people’s threshold for that level of friction. "
Also over time friction would build up in the medium, causing the tape to occasionally resist being pulled so strongly that some sections would stretch and introduce a hard to ignore "wah" effect.
Overall not my favourite means of storing information, like you said - it was fine. I've listened to a huge palette of mixes made by friends for friends and the social aspect of this is something I appreciated greatly.
But the reality is that your usual cryptographic circuit (TLS connection) is just that, a circuit, a cordoning of space off for an interaction between two or more parties. The interaction inside that circuit can be very highly exploitative indeed, i.e., you can now apply for payday loans, gamble, ingest anti-human propaganda online, without anyone around you knowing anything about it.
Which is not to say that cryptographic technology might not broadly be a positive but it's inane to think that all social problems could continually be solved with more code and more cryptography. It has arguably been a key driver of enhanced financialization and militarization of daily life in its current iteration.
This might be favorite metaphor ever, and one I'll quoting in the future! :)
I think the author conflates social media with other inventions like a portable GPS device, an electronic map, a music player, or indeed a cell phone.
As far as social media goes the author is (IMHO) spot on. You do not have to look far to see how that is at least harming democracy around the globe. For democracy to flourish you need reflective voters who can entertain multiple viewpoints and make informed decisions. That is what social media - in its most common current form - discourages and rather optimizes for attention-time (which is money).
And of course (some) anonymity paired with global reach would not bring out the best in people. Anger and flames spread faster than conciliatory messages and get you more dopamine posting those.
Just my $0.02.
Institutionalists view the very word 'Hacker' as 'Wrong' because they're essentially 'Rule Breakers'.
But sometimes rules are bad, and need to be broken.
Libertarians view rules as constraints, so why not break them?
More often than not, rules are there fore a reason.
There's a huge grey area there but what is not grey ... is the issue of the 'morally neutral' impetus that the author is talking about - the seed of which is right at the root of 'Hacker'.
YC does not say 'build something useful and beneficial' - they say 'build something useful'.
Aka no moral impetus towards the greater good.
'Build a gear that is useful to other gears, without concern for what the gears are actually doing'.
It seems benign when there's no power involved - aka startups.
But it's not benign when there's huge concentration of power.
That system leads to endemic competition - which - at the highest levels is economic warfare, or even actual warfare.
There is not flattening in these systems - those things end up in Feudal Power Structures - everyone 'somewhere on the pyramid'.
If you're 'under Musk' right now - anywhere - you dare not speak out against him.
That's the opposite of 'flat or decentralized' - it's just power without democratic impetus, techno authoritarianism, which is paradoxically the thing they seem to lament.
There is something unsettling about how the disjunctive experience that digital media environments produce is romantically portrayed. I think we need to get over the concept of things like "cyberspace". There are no corners of the internet that you "inhabit". "Digital gardening" can go too. Media/information environments shouldn't be thought of in the same way that physical ones are. I don't know why I feel this way. At least I can't form a strong argument to support why...yet. But I think this way of thinking is psychologically detrimental. Go debate a dualist and let me know how it goes.
"Saving the internet" may require that we adopt a realist perspective on what the internet is. You are exchanging data. There's more to it, I'm sure, and the effect of this exchange shouldn't be taken for granted.
This is an over simplification, but I think it's a start.
I mean...Alphabet, Apple, Meta, Palantir, Flock are information technology companies, right? I can get a little obtuse and say that this is the case for most companies involved in the transfer of content of all kinds from one place to another.
Tech companies are lawnmowers and the internet is not where your lawn is. Don't expect either to help you touch or cut your grass.
This is where I fundamentally don't align with the author's perspective. To me it seems obvious that this is exactly what happened. Democracy is by far the most common style of governance, extreme poverty is falling even as the population rises. A substantial majority of all human beings have a magic screen in their pocket that lets them look up any information they're interested in or contact anyone on the planet who they'd like to talk to. How can you possibly look at the world as it exists today and not conclude that technology has radically changed our lives for the better?
The author points towards real problems, certainly, but they're problems because they prevent otherwise great new things from being even more amazing. Would I prefer it if apps that give me interesting photos and videos on-demand had fewer dark patterns and better moderation policies? Yes, that'd be nice.
And substantial majority of them spend half of their waking time staring at TikTok. An improvement for sure.
Perhaps people do want to spend their time on TikTok, that's what freedom is. It is certainly addictive by design, but it's not magic, it is addictive exactly because it's giving you what you want.
We got so much of what we wanted, that was the goal and we are achieving it. Of course, getting everything we want is often not good for us. And what we want to want is not always the same of what we actually want.
Likewise, the number of countries/populations calling themselves democratic has grown, but the global democratic index has declined and mature democracies are substantially threatened.
That’s not a paradox. Inequality is a completely separate measurement that emerges anywhere there are extremely wealthy people despite the average population doing really well.
A high density of tech billionaires in California doesn’t prevent a regular family in Tennessee from putting food on their table. Poverty rates would.
Or allow their bosses to contact them anywhere. Or allow corporations to know their location at all times and use that information for advertising.
There have been tradeoffs to smartphones, and arguably they are worse for individuals than no-smartphone. They increase some convenience which doesn't necessarily translate to a better society or better life for individuals
Take parking for instance. Every parking lot now has an app. So in order to park in many lots you need the app to pay with. But there isn't just one "parking" app, there are parking apps for whoever manages the lot. It's not an improvement at all over just paying at a kiosk, but it means the parking company doesn't have to pay someone to man the kiosk so it's better for them
I'm just saying if you weigh the convenience of your smartphone versus the annoyance, I wouldn't be surprised if the annoyance won a lot of the time. I know it does for me.
I strongly feel that the convenience vs. annoyance is heavily tilted towards the convenience side, and I think people who feel otherwise are just not noticing all the ways that having a PC in their pocket makes their lives easier.
"Democracy" is a meaningless buzzword that is usually thrown around when a Western country wants to kill people and steal things. It is defined as us and the people we support. Meanwhile, two weird little private clubs choose all of the people who go up for election in the US at every level (and have created laws and conventions preventing this from ever changing), and public opinion has absolutely no detectable affect on public policy.
Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens
https://doi.org/10.1017/S1537592714001595
> Multivariate analysis indicates that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence. The results provide substantial support for theories of Economic-Elite Domination and for theories of Biased Pluralism, but not for theories of Majoritarian Electoral Democracy or Majoritarian Pluralism.
Voting isn't any different than non-voting if it can't bring about real change for the better.
The problem is that you, american m..r..n, truly believe that you can ignore the war you wage on Russia, your genocide in Gaza and an attempted genocide in Iran, and continue to live in your "democratic" fantasy land, drinking other people's blood.
I just hope you understand what you are without other massacres. And stop your berserk running to a cliff.
For who? The people who have been living in Gaza for the past millennia (or who were driven there by arms during the Nakba) who the western establishment decided could be deprived of food in 2024? Meaning a genocide. How is all this benefiting them? This is harming them. And many others. Even, to a much lesser degree, the 20% of Cloudflare workers cut this week.
There's nothing preventing you from setting up a web server, downloading free software to run it, getting your friends to view it, building encrypted communication apps that no government can crack, pirating any piece of content in the world, etc...
A libertarian society won't coddle you, and there's psychopaths like Meta who show up in the space and convince a lot of people to follow them. Of course those people suck, but the solution isn't government. It's to stay strong, help your friends be strong, and accept that not everyone will make it. That has always been the flip side of freedom.
The Internet, and now AI, delivered so many of the dreams of my childhood. It is a mostly free society, for better or worse. I'm hoping that intelligence remains distributed, enshittification stops when my agent deals with it for me, and the physical world remains as free as it is. But these aren't things that would be changed with new governance of cyberspace, these are features of the optimization landscape of reality and technological progress.
Do we live in the best possible world, of course not. But this one is pretty good, and it's easy to imagine non libertarian ones that are so much worse. I feel a huge debt to the people who designed the Internet with the foresight that they did, the capture exists at a psychological layer, not a physical one.
Looking at all the new and proposed laws coming through, I don't think we'll have those basic freedoms all that much longer.
Everyone else can get get strip mined for attention and croak, you don't care.
Why? That seems like a big assertion to make in a side sentence without any supporting argument.
It seems the onus is on the other side to justify the state, and that we should't be trying to find alternative solutions to the problems it attempts to solve.
Millions of people live in the US and don’t use Google products or pay Google a dime.
Try not paying taxes because you don’t want to support the actions of the federal government and see how that works out.
The reason democracy is better than other forms of governance is that it provides incentives for those in power which are better aligned with the upholding of human rights and protection against abuse. Myself casting a vote every few years is de facto meaningless.
And all the DDoS and crytocurrency extortions and scams should extend to meatspace too, and you would be okay with it because it's supposedly still better than what govts do?
It is also the only entity powerful enough to stand up to other monopolies, businesses, which are dictatorships without any democratic control.
There will always be a power structure. I'd prefer one I can vote out.
The fundamental flaw in any type of libertarian / anarchist thinking is denying the reality that power will always be concentrated somehow. The libertarian fantasy would result in neofeudalism, if theres no state to stop it.
Representative of who exactly? Generally governments around the world win with <50% of the vote. Those who vote make up a small fraction of the population. Of those who voted for the winning party, only a small fraction of them actually feel fully represented by their party - often people vote strategically, or they vote for the "lesser evil" rather than voting for a representative who wholly represents their views.
The rest have a government who are not representative of them in power over them. Hardly representative of the people.
Talking to people with different opinions is considered tantamount to joining them. It is much better to point the finger of blame rather than suggest a way forward. The best way to criticise someone's argument is to take their words, explain what they really meant by that in a way that supports your argument, making the counterargument ridiculously easy.
What I don't understand is that how people have come to believe that arguing for the things that corporate interests fought for represents standing against those interests.
The thing that has it in a nutshell was this line
>The cumbersome copyright/patent process. Cumbersome to whom, exactly? This is always the move. The thing your industry would prefer not to deal with is reframed as an obsolete burden. Your refusal to do it is rebranded as innovation.
Cumbersome to everyone without a battery of lawyers. Copyright law has only become more powerful, and the patent process has become more a game of who can spend the most in court on this meritless claim. Disney didn't spend all those lobbying dollars extending copyright out of concern for the welfare of the people. They did it because they wanted to buy and own ideas and keep them for themselves for as long as possible.
I am all for robust well enforced regulation to help and protect people. I thing laws should be in the interest of society and the welfare of everyone more than it should for individuals. I don't think anyone advocating for personal freedoms is necessarily arguing against the interests of the group. There are people out there suggesting ways to correct the system through many many boring but required changes, some of them quite little, some of them large, one of the large ones is getting money out of politics.
I wonder if John Perry Barlow advocated for electoral reform to reign in lobbying? Because it didn't happen, and quite frankly arguing about the world that came to pass without that happening isn't going to represent anyone's plans for the future no matter
So what do we want to build? How should the better world be. Don't frame it as Not that!. Do you want the Revolution and Reign of Terror or the Declaration of Independence and a Constitution?
You can fight to build something better, don't confuse fighting to tear down as the same thing because you are angry and fighting about it makes you feel good about that.
Most libertarians are worried about government but not worried about business. I think we need to be worrying about business in exactly the same way we are worrying about government. - John Perry Barlow
Further reading:
1) Barbrook, Richard, and Andy Cameron. ‘The Californian Ideology’. Science as Culture 6, no. 1 (1996): 44–72.
2) Harvey, David. Spaces of Neoliberalization: Towards a Theory of Uneven Geographical Development. Franz Steiner Verlag, 2005.
3) Turner, Fred. From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism. University of Chicago Press, 2006.
4) Mirowski, Philip. Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste: How Neoliberalism Survived the Financial Meltdown. Verso, 2013.
5) Brown, Wendy. In the Ruins of Neoliberalism: The Rise of Antidemocratic Politics in the West. The Wellek Library Lectures. Columbia University Press, 2019.
6) Greer, Tanner. ‘The Silicon Valley Canon: On the Paıdeía of the American Tech Elite’. The Scholar’s Stage, 21 August 2024. https://scholars-stage.org/the-silicon-valley-canon-on-the-p....
7) Stevens, Marthe, Steven R. Kraaijeveld, and Tamar Sharon. ‘Sphere Transgressions: Reflecting on the Risks of Big Tech Expansionism’. Information, Communication & Society 27, no. 15 (2024): 2587–99. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2024.2353782.
8) Lewis, Becca. ‘“Headed for Technofascism”: The Rightwing Roots of Silicon Valley’. Technology. The Guardian (London), 29 January 2025. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/ng-interactive/2025/j....
9) Bria, Francesca, and José Bautista. ‘The Authoritarian Stack’. Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung (FES) Future of Work, 8 November 2025. https://www.authoritarian-stack.info/.
10) Durand, Cédric, Morozov, Evgeny, and Watkins, Susan. ‘How Big Tech Became Part of the State’. Jacobin, 24 November 2025.
11) Spiers, Elizabeth. ‘The Anti-Intellectualism of Silicon Valley Elites’. Elizabeth Spiers, 1 April 2026. https://www.elizabethspiers.com/the-anti-intellectualism-of-....
Hacks like Curtis Yarvin proclaim that code wranglers have solved all the problems and should be running the show because they made money flipping shiny shit to gullible buyers.
Where is Web3 in solving all our problems? What does technofeudalism get the people?
The alternative, of course, is that a nanny state + highly regulated tech + inevitable technology leads to exactly the outcomes we have now. I’d prefer something else personally.
If tech were "highly regulated", the largest tech companies wouldn't be constantly promoting scams to me.
I don't see anything wrong with individuals who by consensus choose to regulate "inevitable" technology. Technology is not a person, and we don't need to make ourselves subservient to it.
I'm thinking of things like liability as a publisher for algorithmic feeds, anti-trust enforcement against companies competing unfairly, mandates for inter-operability to avoid user lock-in, limitations on surveillance capitalism, protections for personal data, maybe also regulating things like advertising, campaigning, fake news, etc.
However anything else would require coercive power structures which go against the idea of radical individualism.
They support "radical individualism" (anarchy) and "free market absolutism" (hierarchy). This is a blatant contradiction no matter how you talk your way out of it.
If you are participating in a free market, then you are subject to corporations. The conclusion of libertarian ideals is that one must both allow corporations to rule over them, and never allow anyone to rule over the corporations.
This is where most people, including the author, present liberalism as the solution. Free market + democratic regulation is a great way to manage an economy; but is it really a good way to manage the rest of society?
The article brings up copyright without exploring the idea at all. I think this is the greatest mistake of all. Copyright is what forces every facet of society to participate in a capitalist market.
Without copyright, what would change? First of all, we wouldn't have tech billionaires. Wouldn't that be nice? Next, we wouldn't be structuring all human interactions with corporate ad platforms. There seems to be a lot of unexplored opportunity there. Even more exciting, moderators would suddenly have all the power that they need to manage the responsibility they are given. No more begging to reddit admins! No more fighting automated censorship! Doesn't that sound good?
It boggles my mind how people from nearly every political perspective have accepted copyright as the one perfect inarguable virtue. Even the cyberlibertarians op argues with are only willing to concede copyright with the promise of a magical free market replacement! Now's as good a time as ever to think about it.
Not quite, they support property rights, which is something that social anarchists implicitly accept as well, they just have a different conception of how that would work. To a right anarchist or libertarian, "Free market absolution" is not an ideology or a goal, it's just the result of private property rights + freedom of association.
Most right-wing libertarians and right-wing anarchists (allow me this even if you disagree with the phrase) are against copyright because it's nonsensical in their conception of what property is and how property rights work. I would assume that left leaning libertarians and social anarchists would also similarly agree that copyright is nonsense but I'm not so sure - the time I spent in those communities have me wondering if they even hate authority and hierarchy, or if they simply desire their own forms of it. Many indeed defend copyright.