A common hope back then was that we would enter a new world by giving every child access to every book every written, with technology and knowledge being the gateway to a better future. The censorship of knowledge and culture would be forever be broken.
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.
I remember that hope for a future where all knowledge would be available at the click of a button, where the internet would be used to enlighten and enrich ordinary people. The internet of today is truly tragic in contrast.
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.
All human knowledge _is_ at one's fingertips. Virtually all books are available through gutenberg or libgen. The vast majority of academic research through sci-hub. The truth is that people are simply not interested.
And some people are simply overwhelmed. In many ways, it was easier to follow cultural development when it was more limited in scope and availability: "this month you'll read this book, listen to this album, watch this movie, and that's it." If you wanted more, you had to work for it, or even travel.
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.
Reflecting on the past I think there was something of a benefit to the limitations imposed by scarcity - in childhood the limitations on what books, games, toys and tv I could find forced me to explore topics and genres I would ignore today, and in my young adulthood there was still something magical about traveling specifically to go hunting for <collectible>.
There were definitely some advanced dynamics that are now very hard to replicate. Some of the businesses that have been wiped out (the record store, the book store, the blockbuster joint...) often acted as cultural nexus in very distinctive ways that websites don't really replicate.
Yeah - going to the bookstore or comic shop used to be something really special. Maybe I'll find something new, maybe I won't, but it's and adventure. I remember traveling across the city to that one comic shop that would have that one obscure comic I needed.
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.
Yeah - I think things are generally a lot better than they were when it comes to a precocious kid's ability to access interesting information.
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).
all knowledge includes quality and crap. The average citizen doesn't have the tools or training to discern the two.
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.
A lot of knowledge isn't contained in books. For one thing, companies have no incentive to publish their so called trade secrets. For another, books are often conceived as supplementary reference material for people who are verbally taught "information." The books are not intended to function on their own.
I mostly agree with you, but it's not all bad. Wikipedia, for all its flaws, is a tremendous repository of knowledge, so are its sister projects. Project Gutenberg stores vast amounts of literature. archive.org preserves literature, video, software, audio data. Librivox offers audio book recordings of public domain literature. And last but not least, free/open source software puts mountains of software for nearly every purpose I could imagine at one's fingertips.
All of these are free for anyone to access and contribute.
Many of these projects got started in the late 1990s or early 2000s, with the 1996 'Declaration' as a key rallying point.
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.
> The internet of today is truly tragic in contrast.
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.)
YouTube is a centralized service that's likely not even economically sustainable in the long term, given the sheer amount of random video junk that gets uploaded on there every minute. I'll take this argument more seriously when a comparable service can be built on 100% commodity tech (probably using some variety of IPFS for cdn-like distributed sourcing) and be made economically sustainable for creators as well (the various crowdfunding platforms are showing that something like this can work).
Now you're moving goalposts. There's a tremendous amount of knowledge of pretty much arbitrary depth on Youtube, and most is pretty well findable using their search, and Youtube is by far not the only knowledge repository out there, and many are more or less "non-proprietary", whatever exactly you mean by that.
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.
What's wrong with PeerTube (aside from it being niche, but that's not really a problem per se, more an opportunity)? Is it difficult to deploy (again, an opportunity to create an easier deployment experience)?
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.
If it was merely corporate "profit motive" then we wouldn't see all the attempts at censorship and control of the internet by governments around the world, including even ones we might think of as "freedom" loving.
Stupid sci-fi analogy incoming: it's almost like the chaos and the warp from 40k. This potential that just became corrupted and amplified by the emotions of beings.
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.
That future is already here, and the Internet today has knowledge that would have been inaccessible by anyone before regardless of his position or power. No university, library or institution did have that much knowledge in the known civilizations.
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.
> the internet would be used to enlighten and enrich ordinary people. The internet of today is truly tragic in contrast.
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.
That's actually super easy
: obscure data sheets for embedded devices, private R&D that companies everywhere hoard, pre-internet content that nobody cares enough about to digitize, any content that rotted or was taken down by the original hosters before being mirrored, things that (dominant) search engines don't archive, things that was left behind by the SEO arms race in a priorty bucket so low it might as well not exist for any reasonable amount of effort, and etc... . Things get even worse if you consider legal questions e.g. the SciHub saga or the YouTube copyrights fiasco
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.
Yesterday I was in the village of Broadwell, just outside Stow on the Wold, UK.
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.
A slight aside, but are you aware of openbenches.org ?
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.
The flaw in this vision was the naive assumption that all or at least most of this information would be honest and correct. It’s the usual failure of mostly honest people to factor in just how many sociopaths there are and to imagine what those with no ethics (or “end justifies the means” ethics) will do.
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.
In some ways, we got this future. We wanted total freedom. We got total freedom.
"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.
I mostly agree, but many of these choices are constrained by problems.
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.
(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.
Even fastmail is still using a centralized service.
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.
I completely agree with your assessment. Everyone from the 1990s to the 2010s chose their poison and the strings that came attached. I myself will even admit to it as I seek to correct my own course. However, a dangerous trend (likely one that's always existed but is now rearing its ugly head) is the imposition of multiple, contradictory views from cultures, governments, interest groups onto those who don't wish to be involved. What's the solution to those who wish to return to the freewheeling heyday of the BBS, Usenet, and Internet forums? Where does one go after shattering the garden wall?
There's literally nothing stopping us from using them again. Usenet is still a thing. Forum software still exists and continues to be maintained. I never used BBS, but I can't see why it can't be brought 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.
I was never a cyber anarchist—I always thought the Internet should be more like the open road of the 1950s than the Wild West of the 1850s. More Democratic libertarian than anarchist. I never imagined it would devolve into basically the feudalism of the 1350s, with dueling warlords not answerable to either the serfs or to any government.
No one is a serf on the internet. You can always choose another website. For all the problems Facebook has, hoarding the secret sauce building the world's largest phone book isn't one of them. After all isn't the point being of being free, whether in life or one the internet, having to answer to no one?
You're also free to voluntarily associate with individuals who share your views and do so on your own terms. Something made more prevalent thanks to personal freedom. On the Internet, there's no limit to the ways and choices one can make to achieve that. There's no bind on your legs or whip to your back. That can't really be said for the serfs of the Middle Ages.
I remember those days. There was a lot of optimism and a feeling of being powerful, especially things like watching the early days of Anonymous vs Scientology. The internet was supposed to be the great enabler of the masses, and instead assholes like Zuckerberg co-opted it to line their own pockets by selling us wholesale to advertisers.
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.
Society as whole, interest groups, governments, banks, retailers and their discounts, forums, HN, itself relies on FOMO and network effects. The only thing making it hard to quit is that value provided by FB as a address book to the individuals who use it is worth the trouble it causes. That's just economics. There's always a choice.
As I recalled it, he found himself with a bullet in the head, his life in ruins.
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.
> This sort of reality only becomes true if we all use cryptographic measures all the time perhaps.
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.
"[All] information should be free" is Zuckerberg's view in its entirety. But even if privacy was no longer an important value how that information is collected is still going to be important distinguishing factor. Information is not and cannot be monopolized. Facebook does not have special powers to extract information directly from individuals. Facebook's "monopoly", if that's what you want to call it, is in employing the best statisticians and data scientists to draw abstractions and correlations to pack and sell to advertisers. It's not about the data taken, but the metadata that's created and the secondary and tertiary observations about your life that can worked back from what you do on the website or any website with a Facebook Pixel.
I don't think it necessarily has to be all the time; just having anonymity available when you want it could be enough in theory.
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.
The internet is still the greatest communication tool humans have ever created. It may not be the completely free landscape envisioned in the 90's but the internet has been the seed of revolution around the world.
Funny story about that: For quite a while the US government considered cryptography, that was too secure, a "controlled munition" [0].
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.
You missed the best part of the struggle: how Phil Zimmerman, author of PGP, had to publish his source code in a book so it'd be protected as speech under the first amendment. His alternative was being thrown in prison for a few decades for illegal export of munitions.
When an esoteric community becomes exoteric radicalism (such as this declaration of independence) begins a watering down process that inevitably leads to loss. Skilled intruders know how to leverage sentiments so that they can get a foot in, and then control the group for political or economical gain.
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].
..it is, alas, the way of history so far. The best example are the high seas. First we were in a state where Spain and Portugal ruled and claimed it all (US on the net), then a lot of contenders came in the form of other seafaring countries (GB, US...) as are now on the net (Japan, Korea, China, EU, Russia...). Finally there were so many that free navigation had to be re-established... and a balance between coastal waters and the high seas... this will most likely happen again, but it will take time and we might live in the time where a tighter national rule might be established temporarily... though I hope not.
Yeah, this ran headlong into the fact that we live in a society.
"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."
But there is not just "that one society", there are many of them with often radically different values.
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.
> 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.
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.
> We have no elected government, nor are we likely to have one, so I address you with no greater authority than that with which liberty itself always speaks. I declare the global social space we are building to be naturally independent of the tyrannies you seek to impose on us. You have no moral right to rule us nor do you possess any methods of enforcement we have true reason to fear.
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.
I used to love this, until I saw the profound antidemocratic sentiment behind it. What Barlow is saying is that there will be a world that cannot be reached or governed, where only (rugged) individuals matter. By extension, votes will matter less, and restrictions on the abuses of the powerful will cease to be.
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.
Perfect anarchy will require going beyond democracy. Once all individuals can internalize altruistic social values in a perfect manner, coercion should not be required. That is effectively the sentiment behind a lot of the '60s philosophy that Barlow is channeling here.
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.
When there is no or insufficient authority, people muscle their way in, until the strongest one is on top. And that's what has happened: facebook and google are the silverbacks of an independent "cyberspace".
I believe the "no government" state is unstable. Something will fill that power vacuum. Which is why places with "no government" tend to be hellholes where warlords wage civil war trying to become the king of the hill.
The kind of maybe which is highly rhetorical. Few people typing here have experienced no government. Collectivism implies decision making, because life consists of making choices which affect others.
If countries try to nationalise cyberspace as their "territory" that they will censor and spy on, it's clear that this collides head on with what users want... the way forward would be an international space like the high seas, but that could only be established by treaty... so it will take time for mare liberum digitalis to happen ;)
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.