21–30 of 82 posts
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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/
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…
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.
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…
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…
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.
The problem might not be venture capital, but simply there being entities (companies) that the government can get to.
Individuals fare even worse. Try to host content that your government does not approve off.
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…
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 the…
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.)
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…
But maybe no government is better. It only says all other forms of government are worse.
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.
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.