alt Hacker NewsI was a great admirer (and later friend) of Barlow, and I'm still very deeply influenced by the Declaration and many adjacent phenomena. I agree with some fraction of this post in terms of seeing many people shelving these principles when it gets inconvenient for them.
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.
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> I think there are lots of other things going on there over and above the moderation issue
This gets referred to as the "moderation issue" because its true cause is too inconvenient.
Algorithms that promote engagement also tend to promote conflict. The major services want people spending more time on their service looking at ads, so they promote engagement and therefore conflict.
The cause of it isn't the decentralized internet, it's the centralized corporate feed.
Humane, as a secular and universally applied sentiment, is a bit of a modern idea, once backed by common goods; shared institutions, third places, extended families, good economy, religion, etc. With those common goods fading, I see people more and more lashing out against each other; particularly in a frictionless environ that incites/outlets fantasy desires. The war of all against all from the safety of our screens; at least for the growing numbers who live their lives on the upper-case Internet.
Lower-case internet is ok as a tool for making spaces. But I reckon humane-ness, or really, virtue, is a habit built from within. And the habits the Internet rewards are generally the wrong ones.
> 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.
Honestly I think it mostly self selected based on who had the technical ability to participate, especially at that time.
> 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"?
For me, the "but" is that I would rather have someone be mean to me than have a corporation collecting all of my data and using it to try and advertise at me
>has been a failure lately on "humane" in the broad sense.
I never saw this as surprising because cyber-libertarianism reads like Gnosticism to me. Even in the sentence you quoted there's already the subtext of being left out "more human than your government" etc. (odd choice of possessive for a man who was campaign coordinator for Dick Cheney)
The people who were into this stuff tended to have an unhealthy relationship to their physical bodies, physical community, felt excluded, tended to have an Enders Game psychology of feeling both inferior and superior at the same time (extremely bad combination for people with power), equipped with the secret cyber knowledge that would give them access to some new space nobody else knew off, and I was never surprised that you got Peter Thiel and Palantir out of this instead of a digital utopia.
I hadn’t heard of Barlow or these articles prior to this post but after reading them all I am left with the same question I have for every libertarian, cyber or otherwise.
When the corporation that runs as a planned economy with only a few unaccountable leaders at the top has as much power as any other existing government, what makes them any different in terms of morality or “goodness”?
I have never gotten a coherent answer and a few times I’ve received violence in response to the question(also a lol as one of the violent ones was also the one to introduce me to the concept of NAP).
Libertarians seem incapable of rationality and are about as convincing as any true believer of a religion you don’t believe in as an outside observer.
The revelations that Epstein had interest and involvement in the development of 4chan really makes me wonder what we would find behind the curtain at next iterations like KiwiFarms, etc if we looked hard enough. Not to sound an overly conspiratorial note, but sewing division within a foreign culture is one of those things that intelligence communities excel at, might match some patterns we’ve seen, and would serve to help explain some of the divergence between expectation and reality, here.
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> Specifically, I think the cyberspace civilization, to the extent that it exists, has been a failure lately on "humane" in the broad sense.
I disagree. By meaningful real-world standards, the average Internet space is in fact extremely humane and polite. People will bring up the random exceptions where groups of people absolutely hate one another and these hates eventually spill over into online spaces, but that's what these are, limited exceptions. By and large, the average online interaction is potentially far more reflective of desirable human values than the ways complete strangers usually interact offline. Perhaps this is a matter of pure self-selection among a tiny niche of especially intellectually-minded folks, but even if this was the case it would still be creating an affordance that wasn't there before.
The article was interesting to read not necessarily as a generative spark but as a datapoint, a symptom of how effective, in the long run, the response from those who saw the internet as a threat was.
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.