The hypocrisy of cyberlibertarianism

The article walks through the logic. Briefly, wide adoption of the ideology expressed in that Davos declaration ("you can't make us obey laws if we're online") enabled the lawbreakers you mention (corporations violating the law while saying "you can't make us obey the laws if we're online").

> A substantial majority of all human beings have a magic screen in their pocket that lets them look up any information they're interested in or contact anyone on the planet who they'd like to talk to

Or allow their bosses to contact them anywhere. Or allow corporations to know their location at all times and use that information for advertising.

There have been tradeoffs to smartphones, and arguably they are worse for individuals than no-smartphone. They increase some convenience which doesn't necessarily translate to a better society or better life for individuals

Take parking for instance. Every parking lot now has an app. So in order to park in many lots you need the app to pay with. But there isn't just one "parking" app, there are parking apps for whoever manages the lot. It's not an improvement at all over just paying at a kiosk, but it means the parking company doesn't have to pay someone to man the kiosk so it's better for them

I'm just saying if you weigh the convenience of your smartphone versus the annoyance, I wouldn't be surprised if the annoyance won a lot of the time. I know it does for me.

> To me it seems obvious that this is exactly what happened. Democracy is by far the most common style of governance, extreme poverty is falling even as the population rises. A substantial majority of all human beings have a magic screen in their pocket that lets them look up any information they're interested in or contact anyone on the planet who they'd like to talk to. How can you possibly look at the world as it exists today and not conclude that technology has radically changed our lives for the better?

For who? The people who have been living in Gaza for the past millennia (or who were driven there by arms during the Nakba) who the western establishment decided could be deprived of food in 2024? Meaning a genocide. How is all this benefiting them? This is harming them. And many others. Even, to a much lesser degree, the 20% of Cloudflare workers cut this week.

I recall my tapes sounding ever so slightly worse after each playback. I also once left one too close to my CRT monitor, which erased all the high frequencies from the sound.

Also over time friction would build up in the medium, causing the tape to occasionally resist being pulled so strongly that some sections would stretch and introduce a hard to ignore "wah" effect.

Overall not my favourite means of storing information, like you said - it was fine. I've listened to a huge palette of mixes made by friends for friends and the social aspect of this is something I appreciated greatly.

I 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.