{"id":21017,"date":"2015-03-23T05:40:23","date_gmt":"2015-03-23T09:40:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/geneveith\/?p=21017"},"modified":"2015-03-22T20:34:48","modified_gmt":"2015-03-23T00:34:48","slug":"the-internets-utopian-libertarianism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/geneveith\/2015\/03\/the-internets-utopian-libertarianism\/","title":{"rendered":"The internet’s utopian libertarianism"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

The Washington Post has a fascinating article about a manifesto written in 1996 entitled\u00a0 A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace<\/a>.\u00a0 (Click the link.\u00a0 It\u2019s worth reading.)\u00a0 The piece is by John Perry Barlow, who articulated a utopian high-tech libertarianism that still influences the tech industry and internet culture.\u00a0 His writing lauds the radical freedom and spiritual changes made possible in the cyberworld, and it is also deadset against any kind of big government, with its regulations and controls.<\/p>\n

Read the piece by Jacob Silverman, who has written a book on the subject, excerpted and linked after the jump.\u00a0 Silverman critiques Barlow for his libertarianism and his opposition to government, maintaining that his successful crusade to keep the internet independent of the government simply allowed private corporations to take over and to do what he did not want government to do.\u00a0 What do you think of this?<\/p>\n

\n

From Jacob Silverman, Meet the man whose utopian vision for the Internet conquered, and then warped, Silicon Valley \u2013 The Washington Post<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Barlow\u2019s 846-word text, published online in February 1996, begins with a bold rebuke of traditional sovereign powers: \u201cGovernments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.\u201d He then explains how cyberspace is a place of ultimate freedom, where conventional laws don\u2019t apply. At the end, he exhorts the Internet to \u201cbe more humane and fair than the world your governments have made before.\u201d . . .<\/p>\n

The language and sensibility suffused Silicon Valley thinking. When Eric Schmidt describes the Internet, however misguidedly, as \u201cthe world\u2019s largest ungoverned space\u201d in his book \u201cThe New Digital Age,\u201d<\/a> he is borrowing Barlow\u2019s rhetoric. When tech mogul Peter Thiel writes, in \u201cThe Education of a Libertarian<\/a>,\u201d that he founded PayPal to create a currency free from government control and that \u201cby starting a new Internet business, an entrepreneur may create a new world,\u201d it\u2019s impossible not to hear Barlovian echoes . . . .<\/p>\n

The Californian Ideology reflected a \u201cnew faith\u201d emerging \u201cfrom a bizarre fusion of the cultural bohemianism of San Francisco with the hi-tech industries of Silicon Valley.\u201d It mixed \u201cthe free-wheeling spirit of the hippies and the entrepreneurial zeal of the yuppies\u201d and drew on the state\u2019s history of countercultural rebellion, its role as a crucible of the New Left, the global-village prophecies of media theorist Marshall McLuhan and \u201ca profound faith in the emancipatory potential of the new information technologies.\u201d Adherents of the California Ideology \u2014 many of them survivors of the \u201cMe\u201d decade, weaned on sci-fi novels, self-help and New Age spiritualism \u2014 forsook the civil actions of an earlier generation. They thought freedom would be found not in the streets but in an \u201celectronic agora,\u201d an open digital marketplace where individuality would be allowed its fullest expression, away from the encumbrances of government and even of the physical world.<\/p>\n

Part of this belief system\u2019s appeal was its ability to combine a host of sometimes incompatible ideas: radical individualism and digital community; neoliberal, free-market capitalism and an Internet industry pioneered by government grants; spiritual truth-seeking and corporate conformity. For hackers turned systems engineers or graffiti artists turned graphic designers, it held great appeal. It promised that they had value and might make the world a better place. Joining Microsoft or AOL didn\u2019t mean selling out; it just meant recalibrating one\u2019s sense of how utopia might be achieved.<\/p>\n

[Keep reading. . . ]<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I\u2019m struck by Barlow\u2019s combination of hippy-esque idealism and Wyoming frontier conservatism (he once worked for Dick Cheney).\u00a0 Again we see how a kind of libertarianism can unite strands of both the left and the right.<\/p>\n

And, yet, the internet has not quite worked out the way he thought it would.\u00a0 But does Silverman\u2019s critique have merit?<\/p><\/div>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Washington Post has a fascinating article about a manifesto written in 1996 entitled\u00a0 A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace.\u00a0 (Click the link.\u00a0 It\u2019s worth reading.)\u00a0 The piece is by John Perry Barlow, who articulated a utopian high-tech libertarianism that still influences the tech industry and internet culture.\u00a0 His writing lauds the radical freedom […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1281,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19,35,44],"tags":[3703,3702,1101,3705,1293,3704],"class_list":["post-21017","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-government","category-philosophy-2","category-technology","tag-anti-government","tag-cyberspace","tag-internet","tag-john-perry-barlow","tag-libertarianism","tag-utopianism"],"yoast_head":"\nThe internet's utopian libertarianism<\/title>\n<meta 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