Cyberspace 'That's right, it fillets, it chops, it dices, slices, never stops, lasts a lifetime, mows your lawn...'
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A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace (1996)
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Re: A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace (1996)
#12I've mentioned this a couple times recently.
Tech workers union thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27581962
Mnot's Next Layer of the Internet thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27581040
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].
Re: A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace (1996)
#13For anyone interested, I believe this is the same audio used in the LP record pressing of JPB reciting the declaration: https://vimeo.com/111576518
Re: A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace (1996)
#14It's a sad reminder of the optimism for the power of the internet we had in the 90's. This sort of reality only becomes true if we all use cryptographic measures all the time perhaps.
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…
Zuckerberg didn't force anyone to join Facebook, this was all voluntary, we did it to ourselves
Re: A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace (1996)
#15A 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.
Re: A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace (1996)
#16A 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…
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Re: A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace (1996)
#17It's a sad reminder of the optimism for the power of the internet we had in the 90's. This sort of reality only becomes true if we all use cryptographic measures all the time perhaps.
> 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.
Re: A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace (1996)
#18It's a sad reminder of the optimism for the power of the internet we had in the 90's. This sort of reality only becomes true if we all use cryptographic measures all the time perhaps.
If cryptography would work for this it would simply be outlawed.
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.
[0] http://www.geekytattoos.com/illegal-tattoos-rsa-tattoos/
Re: A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace (1996)
#19A 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…
Instead, venture capital backed firms devised systems of corporate surveillance and propaganda delivery that would've made the Stasi proud.
What a pity.
Still, at least Sci-Hub and Libgen exist.
Re: A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace (1996)
#20Yeah, 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.