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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)

#51
post #21

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…

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".

Re: A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace (1996)

#52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

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…

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.

Re: A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace (1996)

#53
post #25
post #15

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…

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.

Re: A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace (1996)

#54

For anyone interested, I believe this is the same audio used in the LP record pressing of JPB reciting the declaration: https://vimeo.com/111576518

Sounds best on bootleg cassette tape!

https://faroutmagazine.co.uk/grateful-dead-recordings-14566-...

https://archive.org/details/GratefulDead?query=Barlow

Re: A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace (1996)

#55
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

> Virtually all books are available through gutenberg or libgen

I'm confused by the word "virtually" here.

Does Project Gutenberg + libgen house everything that can be accessed through university subscriptions (Elsevier, etc.) and Google books/scholar?

Re: A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace (1996)

#56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I challenge you to come up with any knowledge I can't click my way through to.

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…

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.

Re: A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace (1996)

#57
post #25
post #15

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…

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.

Re: A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace (1996)

#59
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

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.

Re: A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace (1996)

#60
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

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).

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