John Perry Barlow

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From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism by Fred Turner

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 1960s counterculture, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, back-to-the-land, Bill Atkinson, bioinformatics, Biosphere 2, book value, Buckminster Fuller, business cycle, Californian Ideology, classic study, Claude Shannon: information theory, complexity theory, computer age, Computer Lib, conceptual framework, Danny Hillis, dematerialisation, distributed generation, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dr. Strangelove, Dynabook, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Fairchild Semiconductor, Ford Model T, From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death, future of work, Future Shock, game design, George Gilder, global village, Golden Gate Park, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker Ethic, Haight Ashbury, Herbert Marcuse, Herman Kahn, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, informal economy, intentional community, invisible hand, Ivan Sutherland, Jaron Lanier, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Lewis Mumford, market bubble, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, means of production, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, Mondo 2000, Mother of all demos, new economy, Norbert Wiener, peer-to-peer, post-industrial society, postindustrial economy, Productivity paradox, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, reality distortion field, Richard Stallman, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Hackers Conference, the strength of weak ties, theory of mind, urban renewal, Vannevar Bush, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, Yom Kippur War

Reprint in Whole Earth Review, no. 68 (Fall 1990): 44 –57, available at http://www.eff.org/Misc/Publications/ John_Perry_Barlow/HTML/crime_and_puzzlement_1.html (accessed September 27, 2005). ———. “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace.” 1996. Available at http://www .eff.org/barlow/Declaration-Final.html (accessed November 15, 2004). B i b l i o g ra p h y [ 293 ] ———. “Jack In, Young Pioneer! Keynote essay for the 1994 Computerworld College Edition.” Available at http://www.eff.org/Misc/Publications/John_Perry_Barlow/ HTML/jack_in_young_pioneer.html (accessed September 27, 2005). Barnes, Susan B. Online Connections: Internet Interpersonal Relationships.

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Perhaps the people to whom this book owes the most are those whose lives and work it explores. They have been extraordinarily open and [ x ] Acknowledgments forthcoming, devoting hours and sometimes days to helping me understand their histories. For all of their help, I’d like to thank Bob Albrecht, Dennis Allison, John Perry Barlow, Reva Basch, Keith Britton, Lois Britton, John Brockman, Michael Callahan, John Coate, Doug Engelbart, Bill English, Lee Felsenstein, Cliff Figallo, David Frohman, Asha Greer (formerly Barbara Durkee), Katie Hafner, Paul Hawken, Alan Kay, Kevin Kelly, Art Kleiner, Butler Lampson, Liza Loop, John Markoff, Jane Metcalfe, David Millen, Nancy Murphy, Richard Raymond, Danica Remy, Howard Rheingold, Louis Rossetto, Peter Schwartz, Mark Stahlman, Gerd Stern, Shirley Streshinsky, Larry Tesler, Paul Tough, Jim Warren, and Gail Williams.

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In 1985 he gathered them again on what would become perhaps the most influential computer conferencing system of the decade, the Whole Earth ’Lectronic Link, or the WELL. Throughout the late 1980s and early 1990s, Brand and other members of the network, including Kevin Kelly, Howard Rheingold, Esther Dyson, and John Perry Barlow, became some of the most-quoted spokespeople for a countercultural vision of the Internet. In 1993 all would help create the magazine that, more than any other, depicted the emerging digital world in revolutionary terms: Wired. By recounting their history, this book reveals and helps to explain a complex intertwining of two legacies: that of the military-industrial research culture, which first appeared during World War II and flourished across the cold war era, and that of the American counterculture.

Barefoot Into Cyberspace: Adventures in Search of Techno-Utopia by Becky Hogge, Damien Morris, Christopher Scally

"World Economic Forum" Davos, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, back-to-the-land, Berlin Wall, Buckminster Fuller, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, cloud computing, corporate social responsibility, disintermediation, DIY culture, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Evgeny Morozov, Fall of the Berlin Wall, game design, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker Ethic, Hans Moravec, informal economy, information asymmetry, Jacob Appelbaum, jimmy wales, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, mass immigration, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, MITM: man-in-the-middle, moral panic, Mother of all demos, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, off-the-grid, peer-to-peer, Richard Stallman, Silicon Valley, Skype, Socratic dialogue, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, technoutopianism, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Hackers Conference, Vannevar Bush, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, WikiLeaks

In 1990 (the year of the first networked computer virus), the WELL was Harpers magazine’s cyberspatial venue of choice when it decided to investigate the darker side of computer hacking by inviting New York-based crackers including Phiber Optik and Acid Phreak to join the techno-hippies for an online debate. John Perry Barlow, former lyricist of the Grateful Dead and now the unofficial scribe of the WELL community, documented the experience in his essay Crime And Puzzlement: These kids were fractious, vulgar, immature, amoral, insulting, and too damned good at their work. Worse, they inducted a number of former kids like myself into Middle Age.

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But although so-called “impact litigation” remains a central part of the its operations to this day, as legislators began to ponder how to regulate the ’net, the EFF’s work quickly stretched beyond the courtroom and into the corridors of Washington DC. It was in reaction to the US government’s Telecommunications Act of 1996, which he labelled an “atrocity [that would] place more restrictive constraints on the conversation in Cyberspace than presently exist in the Senate cafeteria”, that John Perry Barlow penned his most famous work, the Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace. The text, which continues to be extensively cited by those wishing to capture the early libertarian idealism of the ’net, begins: Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind.

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We, the technoids, know the future and are spelling it out for you. That’s what Utopia is. It’s there in Plato and it’s there in Thomas More. “Utopias in practice are invariably Dystopias. So Utopia tells you that Dystopia will happen when you try to plan ahead.” In the final paragraphs of his declaration, John Perry Barlow’s defies the ability of states to regulate the ’net, and sets out his belief in the virtual Utopia which is to come: In the United States, you have today created a law, the Telecommunications Reform Act, which repudiates your own Constitution and insults the dreams of Jefferson, Washington, Mill, Madison, DeToqueville, and Brandeis.

Rise of the Machines: A Cybernetic History by Thomas Rid

1960s counterculture, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Alistair Cooke, Alvin Toffler, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, back-to-the-land, Berlin Wall, Bletchley Park, British Empire, Brownian motion, Buckminster Fuller, business intelligence, Charles Babbage, Charles Lindbergh, Claude Shannon: information theory, conceptual framework, connected car, domain-specific language, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dr. Strangelove, dumpster diving, Extropian, full employment, game design, global village, Hacker News, Haight Ashbury, Herman Kahn, Howard Rheingold, Ivan Sutherland, Jaron Lanier, job automation, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Kubernetes, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, Mondo 2000, Morris worm, Mother of all demos, Neal Stephenson, new economy, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, Oklahoma City bombing, operational security, pattern recognition, public intellectual, RAND corporation, Silicon Valley, Simon Singh, Snow Crash, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, technoutopianism, Telecommunications Act of 1996, telepresence, The Hackers Conference, Timothy McVeigh, Vernor Vinge, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, Y2K, Yom Kippur War, Zimmermann PGP

Michael Benedikt (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991), 109. 111.Morningstar and Farmer, interview, April 24, 2014. 112.Ibid. 113.Howard Rheingold, “Teledildonics: Reach Out and Touch Someone,” Mondo 2000 2 (Summer 1990): 52–54. 114.John Perry Barlow, Lee Felsenstein, and Clifford Stoll, “Is Computer Hacking a Crime?” Harper’s 280, no. 1678 (March 1, 1990): 51–52. 115.Ibid., 53. 116.John Perry Barlow, “Crime and Puzzlement: In Advance of the Law on the Electronic Frontier,” Whole Earth Review 68 (Fall 1990): 47. 117.Michael Alexander, “Secret Service Busts Alleged Crime Ring,” Computerworld, May 14, 1990, 128. 118.Barlow et al., “Is Computer Hacking a Crime?

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Computer networks were liberation: “individuals and small groups that go off to start learning how to program, reprogram, boot up, activate, and format their own brains.”76 Leary’s prose captivated droves of students: “We are creatures crawling to the center of the cybernetic world,” he told them, “But cybernetics are the stuff of which the world is made. Matter is simply frozen information.”77 Leary’s language resonated with an emerging subculture. The Grateful Dead’s songwriter John Perry Barlow once described him as a reverse canary in the coal mine, meaning that whatever Tim Leary was interested in, mass culture would discover a few years later.78 Several of the Bay Area firms saw marketing potential in Leary. Autodesk asked him whether he would be willing to pitch their cyberspace vision in a promotional video.

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“Cyberwear,” for Leary and early 1990s counterculture, was a “mutational technology.” Individual brains could now have out-of-body experiences, just as “landware” like legs and lungs had permitted fish to escape the water and have out-of-water experiences. Intrigued by the hype, and an admirer of Leary, Grateful Dead lyricist John Perry Barlow wanted to see for himself. The problem, he understood, had long been the interface. During the twenty years leading up to 1990, human relations with “these magic boxes” had become ever more intimate, at a fast clip. First came austere batch-processing punch cards as input devices—with simple printers as output devices, of the kind Wiener had used when he first interacted with a computer.

Cult of the Dead Cow: How the Original Hacking Supergroup Might Just Save the World by Joseph Menn

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Andy Rubin, Apple II, autonomous vehicles, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Cambridge Analytica, Chelsea Manning, Citizen Lab, commoditize, corporate governance, digital rights, disinformation, Donald Trump, dumpster diving, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, fake news, Firefox, Gabriella Coleman, Google Chrome, Haight Ashbury, independent contractor, information security, Internet of things, Jacob Appelbaum, Jason Scott: textfiles.com, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Laura Poitras, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, Mondo 2000, Naomi Klein, NSO Group, Peter Thiel, pirate software, pre–internet, Ralph Nader, ransomware, Richard Stallman, Robert Mercer, Russian election interference, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, tech worker, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, zero day

Another Prankster, visionary writer and marketer Stewart Brand, would also help spread the good news about the coming age of computing. Brand’s outlets included the ecology-oriented magazine Whole Earth Catalog and the WELL, the pioneering West Coast online community. Among Mann’s friends was Dead lyricist and future WELL regular John Perry Barlow. As a Wesleyan college student, Barlow had begun visiting acid guru Timothy Leary, and he introduced the Dead to Leary in 1967. Later, he wrote songs for the Dead, including “Cassidy,” a tribute to a child that weaves in the history of Beat icon Neal Cassady, still another Prankster. The Dead attended and sometimes performed at Kesey’s “Acid Test” parties, and they became technology enthusiasts as well, encouraging the taping of live shows.

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By the time of his July 1990 trial, Neidorf was majoring in political science in college and disinclined to settle. Neidorf knew the manual had been stolen, but he hadn’t broken into machines himself and had not profited from the theft—Phrack was free to readers. Neidorf’s trial became a pivotal moment for hackers and their defenders, in large part because of Jesse Dryden’s family friend, John Perry Barlow, the freewheeling Grateful Dead lyricist and early fan of online communities who would be a major influence on cDc. Barlow’s fellow acid-taking Deadhead Stewart Brand had spawned the online community the WELL in 1985, and Barlow was a prolific and eloquent contributor. For those with primitive online access via modems, university networks, or other means, it was a mega bulletin board, broken up by topic.

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Do you want to run around like idiots or get something done?’” Laird was becoming the new wise elder, the role Chris Tucker had played. Like Chris Tucker, Laird wasn’t coming from nowhere. He was building on the politicization that had been expressed most dramatically earlier in 1996 by the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s John Perry Barlow, a libertarian Republican. While a party had raged on around him during the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Barlow had read that an over-the-top attempt to ban web porn had just been signed into law in America as part of telecom legislation. “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace” was Barlow’s over-the-top response.

The Internet Is Not the Answer by Andrew Keen

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Airbnb, AltaVista, Andrew Keen, AOL-Time Warner, augmented reality, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Swan, Bob Geldof, Boston Dynamics, Burning Man, Cass Sunstein, Charles Babbage, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, collective bargaining, Colonization of Mars, computer age, connected car, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, data science, David Brooks, decentralized internet, DeepMind, digital capitalism, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, Donald Davies, Downton Abbey, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, fail fast, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frank Gehry, Frederick Winslow Taylor, frictionless, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, gentrification, gig economy, global village, Google bus, Google Glasses, Hacker Ethic, happiness index / gross national happiness, holacracy, income inequality, index card, informal economy, information trail, Innovator's Dilemma, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Perry Barlow, Joi Ito, Joseph Schumpeter, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, Kodak vs Instagram, Lean Startup, libertarian paternalism, lifelogging, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, Mary Meeker, Metcalfe’s law, military-industrial complex, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, nonsequential writing, Norbert Wiener, Norman Mailer, Occupy movement, packet switching, PageRank, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Patri Friedman, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer rental, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, Potemkin village, power law, precariat, pre–internet, printed gun, Project Xanadu, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Metcalfe, Robert Solow, San Francisco homelessness, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, smart cities, Snapchat, social web, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, subscription business, TaskRabbit, tech bro, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, Ted Nelson, telemarketer, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, the long tail, the medium is the message, the new new thing, Thomas L Friedman, Travis Kalanick, Twitter Arab Spring, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber for X, uber lyft, urban planning, Vannevar Bush, warehouse robotics, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, work culture , working poor, Y Combinator

The WELL captured much of the countercultural utopianism of early online users who believed that the distributed structure of the technology created by Internet architects like Paul Baran, with its absence of a central dot, represented the end of traditional government power and authority. This was most memorably articulated by John Perry Barlow, an early WELL member and lyricist for the Grateful Dead, in his later 1996 libertarian manifesto “Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace.” “Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of mind,” Barlow announced from, of all places, Davos, the little town in the Swiss Alps where the wealthiest and most powerful people meet at the World Economic Forum each year.

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So, in answer to Kay’s question, I pitched him all the standard clichés of the time about the economic potential of the Web. I explained how it was an “interactive” and “frictionless” medium for distributing content in which large media companies would be “distintermediated” by agile Web startups. Quoting Web idealists like John Perry Barlow, I promised the magazine publisher that “information wants to be free,” although I had no evidence that information had volition and could demand its own emancipation. Most of all, I presented the Web as a virtual Soho. The Web would create an “abundant” cultural economy, I promised, a cornucopia of music, photographs, writing, and movies where everyone would eventually be able to see, watch, and read anything they chose.

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Between 2002 and 2012, for example, the US Bureau of Labor Statistics reported a 45% drop in the number of professional working musicians—falling from over 50,000 to around 30,000.17 One of the most misleading myths about online piracy is that it’s a bit of harmless fun—an online rave organized by delusional idealists, like Electronic Frontier Foundation founder John Perry Barlow, who just want information to be free. But nothing could be further from the truth.18 Today, online piracy is the big business of peer-to-peer and BitTorrent portals that profit, mostly in advertising revenue, from the availability of stolen content. A report, for example, by the Digital Citizen Alliance, which closely examined the “business models” of over five hundred illegal sites peddling stolen intellectual goods, found that these websites brought in $227 million in ad revenues in 2013, with the average annual advertising sales of the largest thirty of these sites being $4.4 million.19 The most obvious beneficiaries of this economic rape of the creative community are the criminals themselves—thieves like the New Zealand–based Kim Dotcom, the mastermind behind Megaupload, which, at its height, had 180 million registered users and accounted for 4% of all Internet traffic.

Content: Selected Essays on Technology, Creativity, Copyright, and the Future of the Future by Cory Doctorow

AltaVista, AOL-Time Warner, book scanning, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, cognitive load, drop ship, en.wikipedia.org, general purpose technology, informal economy, information retrieval, Internet Archive, invention of movable type, Jeff Bezos, John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow, Law of Accelerating Returns, machine readable, Metcalfe's law, mirror neurons, Mitch Kapor, moral panic, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, new economy, optical character recognition, PalmPilot, patent troll, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, Ponzi scheme, post scarcity, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Sand Hill Road, Skype, slashdot, Snow Crash, social software, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, the long tail, Thomas Bayes, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, Wayback Machine

Copyright notice: This entire work (with the exception of the introduction by John Perry Barlow) is copyright 2008 by Cory Doctorow and released under the terms of a Creative Commons US Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/us/). Some Rights Reserved. The introduction is copyright 2008 by John Perry Barlow and released under the terms of a Creative Commons US Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/us/). Some Rights Reserved. Publication history and acknowledgments: Introduction: 2008, John Perry Barlow Microsoft Research DRM Talk (This talk was originally given to Microsoft's Research Group and other interested parties from within the company at their Redmond offices on June 17, 2004.)

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(Originally published as "How Big Media's Copyright Campaigns Threaten Internet Free Expression," InformationWeek, November 5, 2007) Giving it Away (Originally published on Forbes.com, December 2006) Science Fiction is the Only Literature People Care Enough About to Steal on the Internet (Originally published in Locus Magazine, July 2006) How Copyright Broke (Originally published in Locus Magazine, September, 2006) In Praise of Fanfic (Originally published in Locus Magazine, May 2007) Metacrap: Putting the torch to seven straw-men of the meta-utopia (Self-published, 26 August 2001) Amish for QWERTY (Originally published on the O'Reilly Network, 07/09/2003, http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/wireless/2003/07/09/amish qwerty.html) Ebooks: Neither E, Nor Books (Paper for the O'Reilly Emerging Technologies Conference, San Diego, February 12, 2004) Free(konomic) E-books (Originally published in Locus Magazine, September 2007) The Progressive Apocalypse and Other Futurismic Delights (Originally published in Locus Magazine, July 2007) When the Singularity is More Than a Literary Device: An Interview with Futurist-Inventor Ray Kurzweil (Originally published in Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, June 2005) Wikipedia: a genuine Hitchhikers' Guide to the Galaxy — minus the editors (Originally published in The Anthology at the End of the Universe, April 2005) Warhol is Turning in His Grave (Originally published in The Guardian, November 13, 2007) The Future of Ignoring Things (Originally published on InformationWeek's Internet Evolution, October 3, 2007) Facebook's Faceplant (Originally published as "How Your Creepy Ex-Co-Workers Will Kill Facebook," in InformationWeek, November 26, 2007) The Future of Internet Immune Systems (Originally published on InformationWeek's Internet Evolution, November 19, 2007) All Complex Ecosystems Have Parasites (Paper delivered at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference, San Diego, California, 16 March 2005) READ CAREFULLY (Originally published as "Shrinkwrap Licenses: An Epidemic Of Lawsuits Waiting To Happen" in InformationWeek, February 3, 2007) World of Democracycraft (Originally published as "Why Online Games Are Dictatorships," InformationWeek, April 16, 2007) Snitchtown (Originally published in Forbes.com, June 2007) Dedication For the founders of the Electronic Frontier Foundation: John Perry Barlow, Mitch Kapor and John Gilmore For the staff — past and present — of the Electronic Frontier Foundation For the supporters of the Electronic Frontier Foundation Introduction by John Perry Barlow San Francisco - Seattle - Vancouver - San Francisco Tuesday, April 1, 2008 "Content," huh? Ha! Where's the container? Perhaps these words appear to you on the pages of a book, a physical object that might be said to have "contained" the thoughts of my friend and co-conspirator Cory Doctorow as they were transported in boxes and trucks all the way from his marvelous mind into yours.

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Send us your review Also available on Feedbooks: "The Prophet", Gibran "Thus Spake Zarathustra", Nietzsche "The Magnificent Ambersons", Tarkington "The Good Soldier", Ford "The Red and the Black", Stendhal "Les Misérables", Hugo "Captain Blood", Sabatini "Tess of the d'Urbervilles", Hardy "Lord Jim", Conrad "Stranger Things Happen ", Link www.feedbooks.com Food for the mind Table of Contents Dedication Introduction by John Perry Barlow Microsoft Research DRM Talk The DRM Sausage Factory Happy Meal Toys versus Copyright: How America chose Hollywood and Wal-Mart, and why it's doomed us, and how we might survive anyway Why Is Hollywood Making A Sequel To The Napster Wars? You DO Like Reading Off a Computer Screen How Do You Protect Artists?

The Hacker Crackdown by Bruce Sterling

Apple II, back-to-the-land, Future Shock, game design, ghettoisation, Hacker Conference 1984, Haight Ashbury, Howard Rheingold, HyperCard, index card, informal economy, information security, Jaron Lanier, John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow, machine readable, Mitch Kapor, pirate software, plutocrats, radical decentralization, Silicon Valley, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, technological determinism, The Hackers Conference, the scientific method, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review

., "Mentor," and "Erik Bloodaxe" in Austin. May 7,8,9. USSS and Arizona Organized Crime and Racketeering Bureau conduct "Operation Sundevil" raids in Cincinnatti, Detroit, Los Angeles, Miami, Newark, Phoenix, Pittsburgh, Richmond, Tucson, San Diego, San Jose, and San Francisco. May. FBI interviews John Perry Barlow re NuPrometheus case. June. Mitch Kapor and Barlow found Electronic Frontier Foundation; Barlow publishes CRIME AND PUZZLEMENT manifesto. July 24-27. Trial of Knight Lightning. 1991 February. CPSR Roundtable in Washington, D.C. March 25-28. Computers, Freedom and Privacy conference in San Francisco.

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NuPrometheus was never publicly charged with a crime, or prosecuted, or jailed. But there were no further illicit releases of Macintosh internal software. Eventually the painful issue of NuPrometheus was allowed to fade. In the meantime, however, a large number of puzzled bystanders found themselves entertaining surprise guests from the FBI. One of these people was John Perry Barlow. Barlow is a most unusual man, difficult to describe in conventional terms. He is perhaps best known as a songwriter for the Grateful Dead, for he composed lyrics for "Hell in a Bucket," "Picasso Moon," "Mexicali Blues," "I Need a Miracle," and many more; he has been writing for the band since 1970.

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People of this sort may have a set of windchimes and a dog with a knotted kerchief 'round its neck, but they're also quite likely to own a multimegabyte Macintosh running MIDI synthesizer software and trippy fractal simulations. These days, even Timothy Leary himself, prophet of LSD, does virtual-reality computer-graphics demos in his lecture tours. John Perry Barlow is not a member of the Grateful Dead. He is, however, a ranking Deadhead. Barlow describes himself as a "techno-crank." A vague term like "social activist" might not be far from the mark, either. But Barlow might be better described as a "poet"—if one keeps in mind Percy Shelley's archaic definition of poets as "unacknowledged legislators of the world."

The Transparent Society: Will Technology Force Us to Choose Between Privacy and Freedom? by David Brin

affirmative action, airport security, Ayatollah Khomeini, clean water, cognitive dissonance, corporate governance, data acquisition, death of newspapers, Extropian, Garrett Hardin, Howard Rheingold, illegal immigration, informal economy, information asymmetry, information security, Iridium satellite, Jaron Lanier, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, offshore financial centre, Oklahoma City bombing, open economy, packet switching, pattern recognition, pirate software, placebo effect, plutocrats, prediction markets, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Robert Bork, Saturday Night Live, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, telepresence, The Turner Diaries, Timothy McVeigh, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, UUNET, Vannevar Bush, Vernor Vinge, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, workplace surveillance , Yogi Berra, zero-sum game, Zimmermann PGP

Some of societyʼs best and brightest minds have begun extolling a coming “golden age of privacy,” when no one need ever again fear snooping by bureaucrats, federal agents, or in-laws. The prominent iconoclast John Gilmore, who favors “law ʻnʼ chaos over law ʻnʼ order,” recently proclaimed that computers are literally extensions of our minds, and that their contents should therefore remain as private as our inner thoughts. Another activist, John Perry Barlow, published a widely discussed “Declaration of Independence for Cyberspace” proclaiming that the mundane jurisdictions of nations and their archaic laws are essentially powerless and irrelevant to the Internet and its denizens (or “netizens”). Among the loose clan of self-proclaimed “cypherpunks,” a central goal is that citizens should be armed with broad new powers to conceal their words, actions, and identities.

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At one extreme of this trend are those who demand legal recognition that individuals have a basic right of ownership over any and all data about themselves: no one should be able to use any fact or datum concerning you—not even your name—without your explicit permission. Supporting a quite different approach are some of the most vivid and original thinkers of the information age. John Gilmore, Esther Dyson, John Perry Barlow, and others on the (roughly) libertarian wing were in the vanguard fighting against both the Clipper proposal and the Communications Decency Act. Seeing little need or value in new laws, they hold that technology will be a key factor in defending liberty during the coming era. Fresh tools of encryption and electronic anonymity will protect individuals against intrusive spying by others, and especially by the state.

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In other words, we may not be able to eliminate the intrusive glare shining on citizens of the next century, but the glare just might be rendered harmless through the application of more light aimed in the other direction. Nor is Kelly alone in this opinion among cyber-era luminaries. Even some of the bright people I labeled earlier as “strong privacy advocates”—Esther Dyson and John Perry Barlow, for instance—have publicly mused that transparency might be preferable, if only it could somehow be made to work. Said Barlow: “I have no secrets myself, and I think that everybody would be a lot happier and safer if they just let everything be known. Then, nobody could use anything against them.

Masters of Deception: The Gang That Ruled Cyberspace by Michelle Slatalla, Joshua Quittner

dumpster diving, East Village, Hacker Ethic, hacker house, job automation, John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow, Mitch Kapor, packet switching, ROLM, Stewart Brand, UUNET, Whole Earth Review

About forty guests log in from their homes and participate in an open-ended, freewheeling debate. They were an eclectic group, and among their number were Eli and Mark (uninvited) and a retired cattle rancher and lyricist for the Grateful Dead, John Perry Barlow. Given the amount of time they spent there, it was bound to happen that the boys and Barlow would cross paths online one day. But who could have imagined the repercussions? John Perry Barlow tells everyone he lives in Pinedale, Wyoming, but that's not really true. He actually lives in a much more isolated place, a place called Cora, pop. 4. Cora makes Pinedale look like Los Angeles. Barlow's grandfather founded Sublett County and built a cattle ranch next to 15, 000 acres of forest service land.

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But wait: Aren't Eli and Mark the subject of a major federal investigation? Wasn't thousands of dollars' worth of their computer equipment just confiscated? It would make sense to lay low. On the other hand, all the attention is a little overhwelming and it really doesn't feel like they're in big trouble. Instead, it feels like they'd just got discovered. John Perry Barlow has even recovered sufficiently from the mesmerizing appearance of his credit history on his computer screen to travel to New York, where he'd met Mark and Eli face-to-face. Well, actually, he'd been in town on some other business. An NBC producer wanted Barlow to defend the use of LSD on some TV news show segment, since Barlow had been, after all, the one who'd gotten the Grateful Dead to come to Millbrook in 1967 to hang out with Timothy Leary.

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Do you want to make the argument that these were just poor scientists, and the world was their laboratory? Then try explaining Julio and John taking money from Morty. Try explaining that phone call where Julio said to Mark, "I would, like, crash everything. " The facts trouble Mitch Kapor and John Perry Barlow, whose Electronic Frontier Foundation has been monitoring the progression of the MOD boys' case since the very beginning. They wonder whether the government has taken to picking on defenseless teenagers. One day in 1992, the EFF's staff lawyer (yes, there's a staff now, and an office in Cambridge) comes to New York City to investigate.

System Error by Rob Reich

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Aaron Swartz, AI winter, Airbnb, airport security, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, AltaVista, artificial general intelligence, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Ben Horowitz, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Big Tech, bitcoin, Blitzscaling, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, clean water, cloud computing, computer vision, contact tracing, contact tracing app, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, data is the new oil, data science, decentralized internet, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, deplatforming, digital rights, disinformation, disruptive innovation, Donald Knuth, Donald Trump, driverless car, dual-use technology, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, end-to-end encryption, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, financial engineering, financial innovation, fulfillment center, future of work, gentrification, Geoffrey Hinton, George Floyd, gig economy, Goodhart's law, GPT-3, Hacker News, hockey-stick growth, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, information security, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jim Simons, jimmy wales, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Perry Barlow, Lean Startup, linear programming, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, minimum wage unemployment, Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay, move fast and break things, Myron Scholes, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, NP-complete, Oculus Rift, OpenAI, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Parler "social media", pattern recognition, personalized medicine, Peter Thiel, Philippa Foot, premature optimization, profit motive, quantitative hedge fund, race to the bottom, randomized controlled trial, recommendation engine, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, scientific management, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, side project, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, software is eating the world, spectrum auction, speech recognition, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, strong AI, superintelligent machines, surveillance capitalism, Susan Wojcicki, tech billionaire, tech worker, techlash, technoutopianism, Telecommunications Act of 1996, telemarketer, The Future of Employment, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, traveling salesman, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, trolley problem, Turing test, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, ultimatum game, union organizing, universal basic income, washing machines reduced drudgery, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, When a measure becomes a target, winner-take-all economy, Y Combinator, you are the product

The response was quick: “Democracy? No. To optimize for science, we need a beneficent technocrat in charge. Democracy is too slow, and it holds science back.” Chapter 2 The Problematic Marriage of Hackers and Venture Capitalists In 1996, at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, John Perry Barlow—a lyricist for the Grateful Dead, onetime cattle rancher, and a cofounder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation—penned “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace.” Reacting to the passage in the United States Telecommunications Act of 1996, Barlow channeled the techno-libertarian spirit, writing “Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind.

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Responding to growing calls for regulation, companies are pushing back through lobbying, public relations efforts to sway public opinion, and direct engagement with lawmakers to influence legislation. Not only have the engineers become the financiers, they are now trying to set the rules for how they are, or are not, regulated. It’s an incredible shift from the early days of counterculture hackers—people who might have chatted online with John Perry Barlow about the Grateful Dead at the Whole Earth ’Lectronic Link (WELL)—to those who now look to influence the political arena for the financial benefit of their companies. In 2008, the Illinois General Assembly passed the Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA), a pathbreaking piece of legislation that limits the collection and usage of biometric data, such as fingerprints and facial geometry (which can be inferred from photographs of individuals).

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As Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi put it, “Unwarranted, concentrated economic power in the hands of a few is dangerous to democracy—especially when digital platforms control content. The era of self-regulation is over.” That remains to be seen. Big tech will not submit to regulation without a fight. One outcome is clear: we are in a different land from the one in which John Perry Barlow hoped we might end up. Chapter 3 The Winner-Take-All Race Between Disruption and Democracy A few years ago, at another dinner in Silicon Valley, Reid Hoffman spoke freely as he offered his perspective on the growing public outrage at tech companies. If you are the CEO of a tech company, he said, your primary concern is your competitors.

Internet for the People: The Fight for Our Digital Future by Ben Tarnoff

4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, algorithmic management, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, business logic, call centre, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, computer vision, coronavirus, COVID-19, decentralized internet, deep learning, defund the police, deindustrialization, desegregation, digital divide, disinformation, Edward Snowden, electricity market, fake news, Filter Bubble, financial intermediation, future of work, gamification, General Magic , gig economy, God and Mammon, green new deal, independent contractor, information asymmetry, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Jessica Bruder, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Leo Hollis, lockdown, lone genius, low interest rates, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, Menlo Park, natural language processing, Network effects, Nicholas Carr, packet switching, PageRank, pattern recognition, pets.com, profit maximization, profit motive, QAnon, recommendation engine, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, side project, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, smart grid, social distancing, Steven Levy, stock buybacks, supply-chain management, surveillance capitalism, techlash, Telecommunications Act of 1996, TikTok, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, undersea cable, UUNET, vertical integration, Victor Gruen, web application, working poor, Yochai Benkler

A body of glass, copper, silicon, and a thousand other things—things that have to be dug out of the earth and hammered into useful shapes, with significant inputs of labor and energy. Bodies are material; they are also historical. If the internet is not a place of pure spirit—a “civilization of the Mind,” as the cyberlibertarian John Perry Barlow once called it—neither is it a place untouched by the past. It is entangled with history, and often in quite literal ways. One way is infrastructural. Submarine cables like MAREA, writes the scholar Nicole Starosielski, frequently follow “the contours of earlier networks.” Installing underwater lines is expensive, and it’s safer to follow known paths than to pioneer new ones.

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In the 1990s, the idea of cyberspace as a realm beyond race and gender was everywhere. Television commercials of the time trafficked in it; so did prominent pundits. Bodies would be left behind, along with the differences that marked them and the injustices that attended those differences. “Ours is a world that is both everywhere and nowhere,” wrote the cyberlibertarian John Perry Barlow in 1996, “but it is not where bodies live.” Yet it was abundantly clear that the internet was indeed a place where bodies lived, though this clarity was mostly reserved for those who inhabited bodies that were not white and not male. Cyberspace was suffused with the bigotries that users brought with them.

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Through a well-organized offensive, right-wing activists have made social media into an accelerator for their politics. Indeed, the resurgence of the far Right, both in the US and around the world, is hard to imagine without this development. It was David Duke, former Ku Klux Klan grand wizard, and not John Perry Barlow, former Grateful Dead lyricist, who saw the future of the internet most clearly. But how has Duke’s vision been fulfilled, exactly? How do the online malls of social media politicize people? This is a matter of much complexity, and much confusion. Beyond the Bubble The popular version goes something like this: users are being brainwashed by disinformation.

Orwell Versus the Terrorists: A Digital Short by Jamie Bartlett

augmented reality, barriers to entry, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Edward Snowden, eternal september, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Free Software Foundation, John Perry Barlow, Kuwabatake Sanjuro: assassination market, Laura Poitras, Mondo 2000, Satoshi Nakamoto, technoutopianism, Zimmermann PGP

Many of the net’s early advocates believed that, by enabling people to communicate more freely with each other, it would help to end misunderstanding and hatred. Nicholas Negroponte – former Director of the illustrious MIT Media Lab – declared in 1997 that the internet would bring about world peace, and the end of nationalism. For some, like John Perry Barlow, author of the Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, this new, free world could help to create just, humane and liberal societies – better than those ‘weary giants of flesh and steel’. None of them predicted the endless cat memes, or the inane holiday pictures, the Islamist propaganda, or child pornography networks.

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Many techno-optimists, such as the cheerleaders for the networked revolution Wired and Mondo 2000 magazines, believed cyberspace would herald a new dawn of learning and understanding, even the end of the national state. The best statement of this view was the American essayist and prominent cyberlibertarian John Perry Barlow’s 1996 ‘Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace’, which announced to the real world that ‘your legal concepts of property, expression, identity, movement, and context do not apply to us . . . our identities have no bodies, so, unlike you, we cannot obtain order by physical coercion.’ Barlow believed that the lack of censorship and the anonymity that the net seemed to offer would foster a freer, more open society, because people could cast off the tyranny of their fixed real-world identities and create themselves anew.

The System: Who Owns the Internet, and How It Owns Us by James Ball

"World Economic Forum" Davos, behavioural economics, Big Tech, Bill Duvall, bitcoin, blockchain, Cambridge Analytica, Chelsea Manning, cryptocurrency, digital divide, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, fake news, financial engineering, Firefox, Frank Gehry, Internet of things, invention of movable type, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, Laura Poitras, Leonard Kleinrock, lock screen, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Minecraft, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, Network effects, Oculus Rift, packet switching, patent troll, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, ransomware, RFC: Request For Comment, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, self-driving car, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, Steve Crocker, Stuxnet, surveillance capitalism, systems thinking, The Chicago School, the long tail, undersea cable, uranium enrichment, WikiLeaks, yield management, zero day

Cohn’s connection to EFF dates right back to 1990; she had studied human rights law through law school, and been interested in that field. By virtue of living in the Bay Area, she fell in with a crowd of people involved in the early internet, before the World Wide Web. These included John Gilmore, an early Sun Microsystems employee, and John Perry Barlow, perhaps best known as the lyricist for the Grateful Dead. Barlow, who died aged seventy in 2018,8 became known through the 1990s as something of an internet visionary, seeing its potential – but also its risks. ‘I honestly believe, without hyperbole, that the people in this room are doing things which will change the world more than anything since the capture of fire,’ he told a room of technologists in 1994.

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Their eyes just glaze over, yet all the people who they’re supporting all round the world who are trying to do this kind of work depend on it.’ Cohn, though, will stay optimistic. Her two and a half decades at the front lines of these online battles – which have only seen the stage get larger and the stakes get higher – have not dented the optimism she shared with John Perry Barlow and others in the 1990s. Just because the task ahead is a tough one doesn’t mean it’s a fight not worth having – especially if you keep the upsides of the internet in mind, something that can be easy to forget when daunted by the power and money arrayed against its promise. ‘I think that it is still the case that more people have a chance to reach a bigger audience through the digital networks than ever before in the history of mankind,’ Cohn says of the internet’s upside.

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From long before most of us cared about the internet, it was mired in regulatory battles – and where there are regulatory power battles, there is the potential for power grabs, and for profits. The new, online world built from the networks these cables facilitated was hardly unencumbered from the power players of the old world, though. When John Perry Barlow presented his declaration of the independence of cyberspace in 1996, he already knew it was an aspiration rather than a reality (much like the USA’s own declaration of independence when it was first signed). How could he not, given he had co-founded EFF six years previously to fight government seizure of online communications?

Dawn of the Code War: America's Battle Against Russia, China, and the Rising Global Cyber Threat by John P. Carlin, Garrett M. Graff

1960s counterculture, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Aaron Swartz, air gap, Andy Carvin, Apple II, Bay Area Rapid Transit, bitcoin, Brian Krebs, business climate, cloud computing, cotton gin, cryptocurrency, data acquisition, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, driverless car, drone strike, dual-use technology, eat what you kill, Edward Snowden, fake news, false flag, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Hacker Ethic, information security, Internet of things, James Dyson, Jeff Bezos, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Ken Thompson, Kevin Roose, Laura Poitras, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, millennium bug, Minecraft, Mitch Kapor, moral hazard, Morris worm, multilevel marketing, Network effects, new economy, Oklahoma City bombing, out of africa, packet switching, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, performance metric, RAND corporation, ransomware, Reflections on Trusting Trust, Richard Stallman, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, South China Sea, Steve Crocker, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, The Hackers Conference, Tim Cook: Apple, trickle-down economics, Wargames Reagan, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, WikiLeaks, Y2K, zero day, zero-sum game

, 173. 61. Ibid., 207. 62. Ibid., 223. 63. “Remembering Grateful Dead Lyricist and Internet Activist John Perry Barlow,” Fresh Air from NPR, February 9, 2018, www.npr.org/2018/02/09/584508647/remembering-grateful-dead-lyricist-and-internet-activist-john-perry-barlow. 64. “Cyber-Libertarian and Pioneer John Perry Barlow Dies at Age 70,” The Two-Way: Breaking News from NPR, February 7, 2018, www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2018/02/07/584124201/cyber-libertarian-and-pioneer-john-perry-barlow-dies-at-age-70. 65. Steve Schroeder, The Lure: The True Story of How the Department of Justice Brought Down Two of the World’s Most Dangerous Cyber Criminals (Course Technology PTR, 2011), 27. 66.

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We took that moment of hope in the 1990s for granted, as Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man made it appear that ideological struggles were over and democracy would reign supreme.* At the time, the rising digital world seemed to take freedom even one natural step further, allowing for a place that can be without rules and completely unfettered. The same year, 1996, that I worked at Freedom House, John Perry Barlow—a former lyricist for the Grateful Dead who been an early participant in the web—authored and posted online a “Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace,” writing, “Governments 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.

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“This kind of conduct will not be tolerated.”61 Journalists warned that the security problems ahead looked dire; the phone company systems and the online network, Tymnet, that the hackers had penetrated “look[ed] like a fortress” compared to the new World Wide Web, which had “virtually no security.”62 Through the 1990s, the Communications Decency Act—which tried to severely restrict “indecent” content online—and the Clipper chip debate—where the Clinton administration proposed outfitting computers with encryption that only the government could decode—sparked online uproars among those who felt the government was treading on the inherent freedom that online space provided. As I went through law school, I followed the debates and declarations from John Perry Barlow and others about defending the unique sovereignty of the online space. Barlow, who raised cattle in Wyoming, recalls awakening to the challenges of cyberspace when an FBI agent, Richard Baxter, showed up at his ranch asking about the “New Prosthesis League,” which was actually a hacking group known as Nu Prometheus League.

Free Ride by Robert Levine

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Anne Wojcicki, book scanning, borderless world, Buckminster Fuller, citizen journalism, commoditize, company town, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, death of newspapers, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Firefox, future of journalism, Googley, Hacker Ethic, informal economy, Jaron Lanier, John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow, Joi Ito, Julian Assange, Justin.tv, Kevin Kelly, linear programming, Marc Andreessen, Mitch Kapor, moral panic, offshore financial centre, pets.com, publish or perish, race to the bottom, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, spectrum auction, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, subscription business, Telecommunications Act of 1996, the long tail, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks

In a January 1996 Wired article about Lehman’s proposals, the legal scholar Pamela Samuelson wrote, “Lehman aims to be the sheriff who will kick those anarchic digital cowboys off the Net and make the electronic frontier safe for businesses that want to set up shop there.”18 But Samuelson didn’t note that the bill’s opponents also wanted to make the Internet safe for businesses—they just happened to be different businesses. Plenty of activists wanted information to be free so they’d have an easier time selling computers, Internet access, or online advertising. Some of the rhetoric was far more radical. In February 1996, the Grateful Dead lyricist turned digital activist John Perry Barlow published “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace.”19 Barlow was reacting to the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which had plenty of faults. But he came up with one of the more overblown manifestos in the history of the Internet, which is no small distinction: Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind.

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Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit to stay Patel’s injunction.26 As Boies shaped Napster’s defense, anticopyright activists weighed in separately to support the service. The free culture activist Lawrence Lessig, then teaching law at Stanford University, submitted an “expert report” to Judge Patel that argued Napster would have legitimate uses, even if they hadn’t emerged yet.27 John Perry Barlow, who had written “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace,” contributed a manifesto to Wired claiming that Judge Patel’s injunction had turned “millions of politically apathetic youngsters into electronic Hezbollah.”28 Barlow said he thought Napster should have been “Napster.org”—a nonprofit—even though everyone at the company but Shawn Fanning was motivated by monetary gain.29 In Barlow’s view, the future would involve voluntary payments to artists “without the barbaric inconvenience”—italics his—“currently imposed by the entertainment industry.”30 Other pundits simply decided the law didn’t matter.

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Not everyone wants that. On a fundamental level, some online activists and the companies that fund them are so attached to the idea of a perfectly open Internet that they won’t accept any action that protects the rights of creators. Remember that the Electronic Frontier Foundation was cofounded by John Perry Barlow, who told the governments of the world, “You have no sovereignty where we gather.”35 In May 2010, the organization made the very reasonable suggestion that creators need to stop suing individual copyright infringers.36 Then, a few months later, it objected to COICA on the grounds that it constituted censorship.

The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America by Margaret O'Mara

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, accounting loophole / creative accounting, affirmative action, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, AltaVista, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Web Services, An Inconvenient Truth, AOL-Time Warner, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, autonomous vehicles, back-to-the-land, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Bob Noyce, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, business climate, Byte Shop, California gold rush, Californian Ideology, carried interest, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, company town, Compatible Time-Sharing System, computer age, Computer Lib, continuous integration, cuban missile crisis, Danny Hillis, DARPA: Urban Challenge, deindustrialization, different worldview, digital divide, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Dynabook, Edward Snowden, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fairchild Semiconductor, Frank Gehry, Future Shock, Gary Kildall, General Magic , George Gilder, gig economy, Googley, Hacker Ethic, Hacker News, high net worth, hockey-stick growth, Hush-A-Phone, immigration reform, income inequality, industrial research laboratory, informal economy, information retrieval, invention of movable type, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, It's morning again in America, Jeff Bezos, Joan Didion, job automation, job-hopping, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kitchen Debate, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, Laura Poitras, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Mary Meeker, mass immigration, means of production, mega-rich, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, millennium bug, Mitch Kapor, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, new economy, Norbert Wiener, old-boy network, Palm Treo, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, Paul Terrell, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, pirate software, popular electronics, pre–internet, prudent man rule, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robert Metcalfe, ROLM, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Snapchat, social graph, software is eating the world, Solyndra, speech recognition, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, supercomputer in your pocket, Susan Wojcicki, tacit knowledge, tech billionaire, tech worker, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the market place, the new new thing, The Soul of a New Machine, There's no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home - Ken Olsen, Thomas L Friedman, Tim Cook: Apple, Timothy McVeigh, transcontinental railway, Twitter Arab Spring, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Unsafe at Any Speed, upwardly mobile, Vannevar Bush, War on Poverty, Wargames Reagan, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, work culture , Y Combinator, Y2K

I’ve got ideas all day long, I can’t control them, it’s like, they come charging in, I can’t even fight ’em off if I wanted to. Night Shift (1982)1 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. JOHN PERRY BARLOW, “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace,” 19962 The machine that is everywhere hailed as the very incarnation of the new had revealed itself to be not so new after all, but a series of skins, layer on layer, winding around the messy, evolving idea of the computing machine. ELLEN ULLMAN, Life in Code, 19983 CONTENTS Also by Margaret O’Mara Title Page Copyright Dedication Epigraph List of Abbreviations Introduction: The American Revolution ACT ONE: START UP Arrivals Chapter 1: Endless Frontier Chapter 2: Golden State Chapter 3: Shoot the Moon Chapter 4: Networked Chapter 5: The Money Men Arrivals Chapter 6: Boom and Bust ACT TWO: PRODUCT LAUNCH Arrivals Chapter 7: The Olympics of Capitalism Chapter 8: Power to the People Chapter 9: The Personal Machine Chapter 10: Homebrewed Chapter 11: Unforgettable Chapter 12: Risky Business ACT THREE: GO PUBLIC Arrivals Chapter 13: Storytellers Chapter 14: California Dreaming Chapter 15: Made in Japan Chapter 16: Big Brother Chapter 17: War Games Chapter 18: Built on Sand ACT FOUR: CHANGE THE WORLD Arrivals Chapter 19: Information Means Empowerment Chapter 20: Suits in the Valley Chapter 21: Magna Carta Chapter 22: Don’t Be Evil Arrivals Chapter 23: The Internet Is You Chapter 24: Software Eats the World Chapter 25: Masters of the Universe Departure: Into the Driverless Car Photographs Acknowledgments Note on Sources Notes Image Credits Index About the Author LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS ACM: Association for Computing Machinery AEA: American Electronics Association AI: Artificial intelligence AMD: Advanced Micro Devices ARD: American Research and Development ARM: Advanced reduced-instruction-set microprocessor ARPA: Advanced Research Projects Agency, Department of Defense, renamed DARPA AWS: Amazon Web Services BBS: Bulletin Board Services CDA: Communications Decency Act of 1996 CPSR: Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility CPU: Central processing unit EDS: Electronic Data Systems EFF: Electronic Frontier Foundation EIT: Enterprise Integration Technologies ENIAC: Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer ERISA: Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974 FASB: Financial Accounting Standards Board FCC: Federal Communications Commission FTC: Federal Trade Commission GUI: Graphical user interface HTML: Hypertext markup language IC: Integrated circuit IPO: Initial public offering MIS: Management information systems MITI: Ministry of International Trade and Industry (of Japan) NACA: National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, later superseded by NASA NASA: National Aeronautics and Space Administration NASD: National Association of Securities Dealers NDEA: National Defense Education Act NII: National Information Infrastructure NSF: National Science Foundation NVCA: National Venture Capital Association OS: Operating system OSRD: U.S.

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In 1985 came the most famous of the early BBSs: The WELL, or Whole Earth ’Lectronic Link, started by Stewart Brand and his merry band of hackers up in Marin County. The WELL’s fame came from the Silicon Valley celebrities who made it their first online hangout, including Grateful Dead lyricist John Perry Barlow, journalist Steven Levy, Lotus founder Mitch Kapor, and of course Brand himself. The bland Ohioans running CompuServe (now owned by even blander tax preparer H&R Block) couldn’t compete with The WELL’s glamour and dash. The WELL’s pedigree was decidedly countercultural, as it hired a clutch of its founding staff from the legendary Tennessee commune The Farm, and devoted considerable discussion-thread and file-swapping bandwidth to the Dead.

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Operation Sun Devil suddenly made him realize how vulnerable any chat room could be to government snoops. “This could have been me,” he realized.4 Flush with many millions from selling his Lotus stock, Kapor established a legal defense fund for the accused hackers and began raising money among his friends. One contributor was fellow WELL denizen John Perry Barlow, for whom the raid had prompted flashbacks to the 1960s and a government that was “a thing of monolithic and evil efficiency.” By summer’s end, Kapor, Barlow, and several other tech-industry insiders went even further, establishing a new group to fight government threats to the free flow of computerized information, and to establish some new rules for a medium that defied so many of the old ones.

WikiLeaks and the Age of Transparency by Micah L. Sifry

1960s counterculture, Amazon Web Services, Andy Carvin, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Buckminster Fuller, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, Climategate, crowdsourcing, digital divide, digital rights, Evgeny Morozov, Gabriella Coleman, Google Earth, Howard Rheingold, Internet Archive, Jacob Appelbaum, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Network effects, RAND corporation, school vouchers, Skype, social web, source of truth, Stewart Brand, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, web application, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler

Activists affiliated with the online collective “Anonymous” organized powerful counterattacks, 37 WIKILEAKS AND THE AGE OF TRANSPARENCY showering the websites of Amazon, PayPal, MasterCard, and others they perceived to be WikiLeaks’ antagonists with “distributed denial-of-service” attacks, essentially paralyzing them with tens of thousands of coordinated web page requests per second. No one knew who or what was in charge of Anonymous, but we could see its members working via anonymous Internet chat rooms and collaborative writing tools. Hailing the emergence of this resistance, the cyberlibertarian activist John Perry Barlow wrote on his Twitter feed: “The first serious infowar is now engaged. The field of battle is WikiLeaks. You are the troops.” 38 MICAH L. SIFRY 2 The Beginning of the Age of Networked Politics Imagine for a moment: millions of people sitting in their shuttered homes at night, bathed in that ghostly blue television aura.

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Let’s say that everything stays ninety-nine percent the same, that people watch ninety-nine percent as much television as they used to, but one percent of that is carved out for producing and for sharing. The Internet-connected population watches roughly a trillion hours of TV a year. That’s about five times the size of the annual U.S. consumption. One percent of that is one hundred Wikipedia projects per year worth of participation.19 John Perry Barlow’s infowar has begun in earnest, because a significant portion of the population that is leaning forward and choosing to produce and share information—a piece of this gigantic cognitive surplus, if you will—has decided that we would like to know what is actually going on. 63 WIKILEAKS AND THE AGE OF TRANSPARENCY 4 Kicking Down the Door to the Smoke-Filled Room Transparency is the new objectivity.

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DDOS is a powerful new tool for harassing one’s adversaries online, and some political activists have argued that as it doesn’t cause any permanent damage, it should be considered a new form of online civil disobedience, like a digital sit-in.25 However, it’s hard to see how you can protest the suppression of online speech by suppressing someone else’s online speech. Personally, I agree with cyber-libertarian John Perry Barlow, who called DDOS the “poison gas” of online activism.26 As a tool, it may do more harm than good, as the kinds of entities that are least able to defend themselves from a concerted denial of service attack tend to be small, independent human rights and dissident groups.27 They can seek refuge by migrating their services to corporate platforms, like Google’s Blogger.

Lurking: How a Person Became a User by Joanne McNeil

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Ada Lovelace, Adam Curtis, Airbnb, AltaVista, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Andy Rubin, benefit corporation, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Burning Man, Cambridge Analytica, Chelsea Manning, Chris Wanstrath, citation needed, cloud computing, context collapse, crowdsourcing, data science, deal flow, decentralized internet, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, eternal september, fake news, feminist movement, Firefox, gentrification, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, green new deal, helicopter parent, holacracy, Internet Archive, invention of the telephone, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Perry Barlow, Jon Ronson, Julie Ann Horvath, Kim Stanley Robinson, l'esprit de l'escalier, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Max Levchin, means of production, Menlo Park, Mondo 2000, moral panic, move fast and break things, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, packet switching, PageRank, pre–internet, profit motive, Project Xanadu, QAnon, real-name policy, recommendation engine, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, slashdot, Snapchat, social graph, Social Justice Warrior, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, subscription business, surveillance capitalism, tech worker, techlash, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, Turing complete, Wayback Machine, We are the 99%, web application, white flight, Whole Earth Catalog, you are the product

The façade of weightless expression of identity against the mechanics of data capture and surveillance created ideological fractures among the internet’s most involved netizens. Fred Turner, in his classic From Counterculture to Cyberculture, recounts a revealing exchange that happened in an online conference on The WELL in 1989, in collaboration with 2600 and Harper’s magazines. One of the panelists, John Perry Barlow—a founding member of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and, before that, a lyricist for the Grateful Dead—had the best intentions but a hopelessly optimistic idea of the internet. It was a communal town square, the Wild West, a democratizing change agent, notions that he would synthesize in his influential text from 1996, “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace,” which claims freedom as a central and untrammeled tenet of the internet experience.

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* * * Long one of the top ten most-visited websites, Wikipedia differs widely from all other major internet players because its content is collectively vetted and not monetized. Founded in 2001, its business model and editorial strategy seem like nineties cyberspace holdovers, inheriting that generation’s optimism along with its blind spots. It carries the torch of John Perry Barlow’s principles in “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace,” and in addition to what it is not, Wikipedia isn’t anticapitalist. The founder, Jimmy Wales, like many cyber-utopians, was a libertarian (albeit his Twitter feed now suggests that, like a lot of libertarians in the Clinton years, he’s since moved to the left).

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Even in later years, hardly anyone has set their film or fiction in this time period and scene (notable exception: Thomas Pynchon’s Bleeding Edge, 2013). Until then, we might look to nineties San Francisco for West Coast context, including Lynn Hershman Leeson, who made the film Conceiving Ada, about a computer artist making a CD-ROM, which starred Tilda Swinton as Ada Lovelace and included appearances by John Perry Barlow, Bruce Sterling, and Timothy Leary. That same year—1997—Ellen Ullman’s Close to the Machine (City Lights) was published, recounting her work as a computer engineer. I wrote about the camgirl art movement in the 2014 book Art and the Internet (Black Dog Publishing, 2014, 18–23). Jennifer Ringley reported that JenniCam received 100 million page views a week, but that was self-reported, and Theresa M.

Digital Disconnect: How Capitalism Is Turning the Internet Against Democracy by Robert W. McChesney

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, access to a mobile phone, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, American Legislative Exchange Council, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, AOL-Time Warner, Automated Insights, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, business cycle, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, classic study, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, collective bargaining, company town, creative destruction, crony capitalism, David Brooks, death of newspapers, declining real wages, digital capitalism, digital divide, disinformation, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, Dr. Strangelove, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, fake news, Filter Bubble, fulfillment center, full employment, future of journalism, George Gilder, Gini coefficient, Google Earth, income inequality, informal economy, intangible asset, invention of agriculture, invisible hand, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, Metcalfe’s law, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, national security letter, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, new economy, New Journalism, Nicholas Carr, Occupy movement, ocean acidification, offshore financial centre, patent troll, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, post scarcity, Post-Keynesian economics, power law, price mechanism, profit maximization, profit motive, public intellectual, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Nader, Richard Stallman, road to serfdom, Robert Metcalfe, Saturday Night Live, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, single-payer health, Skype, spectrum auction, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, technological determinism, Telecommunications Act of 1996, the long tail, the medium is the message, The Spirit Level, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, transfer pricing, Upton Sinclair, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, yellow journalism, Yochai Benkler

Lewis Hyde, Common as Air: Revolution, Art, and Ownership (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2010), 199–206. 57. Don Clark, “Facing Early Losses, Some Web Publishers Begin to Pull the Plug,” Wall Street Journal, Jan. 14, 1997, A8. 58. Cited in Joseph Turow, The Daily You (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011), 15. 59. J.D. Lasica, “John Perry Barlow: ‘People Want to Bypass the Mass Media,’” May 24, 1996, www.jdlasica.com/1996/05/24/john-perry-barlow-people-want-to-bypass-the-mass-media. 60. Michael Mandiberg, introduction, in Michael Mandiberg, ed., The Social Media Reader (New York: New York University Press, 2012), 1. 61. See, for example, Clifford G. Christians, Theodore L. Glasser, Denis Mc-Quail, Kaarle Nordenstreng, and Robert A.

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“We are talking about a field,” one commercial website producer lamented in 1997, “where it’s not even clear who should pay whom.”57 This led in the 1990s to an initial deluge of euphoria from those who found the corporate media status quo unsatisfactory. “The world has suddenly developed a printing press for every person on the planet,” Henry Jenkins enthused.58 The media conglomerates, in their wheeling and dealing, were simply engaging in the “rearrangement of deck chairs on the Titanic,” as Grateful Dead lyricist John Perry Barlow of the Electronic Freedom Foundation famously put it. The infinitude of websites and the ability of anyone to go toe to toe with Rupert Murdoch was their death knell: “I think they are, in their present manifestations, goners.”59 Scarcity, a requirement for capitalist markets, no longer existed!

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The giant media firms have not disappeared, nor has the Internet eliminated television and Hollywood. Marketing is a mandatory core institution of contemporary capitalism; the $300 billion spent annually on advertising and sales promotion was not about to go gentle into that good night when John Perry Barlow fired up his bong and showed it the door. These are extremely powerful institutions with tremendous political and economic power; they have flexed it mightily and with great effect. But their world was being turned upside down, and the emergence of social media only underscored their dilemma.

The Filter Bubble: What the Internet Is Hiding From You by Eli Pariser

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, A Pattern Language, adjacent possible, Amazon Web Services, An Inconvenient Truth, Apple Newton, augmented reality, back-to-the-land, Black Swan, borderless world, Build a better mousetrap, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, data acquisition, disintermediation, don't be evil, Filter Bubble, Flash crash, fundamental attribution error, Gabriella Coleman, global village, Haight Ashbury, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, megacity, Metcalfe’s law, Netflix Prize, new economy, PageRank, Paradox of Choice, Patri Friedman, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, power law, recommendation engine, RFID, Robert Metcalfe, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social graph, social software, social web, speech recognition, Startup school, statistical model, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, technoutopianism, Ted Nordhaus, The future is already here, the scientific method, urban planning, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator, Yochai Benkler

It’s hard to imagine a more dramatic departure from the early days of the Internet, in which not exposing your identity was part of the appeal. In chat rooms and online forums, your gender, race, age, and location were whatever you said they were, and the denizens of these spaces exulted about the way the medium allowed you to shed your skin. Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) founder John Perry Barlow dreamed of “creating a world that all may enter without privilege or prejudice accorded by race, economic power, military force, or station of birth.” The freedom that this offered anyone who was interested to transgress and explore, to try on different personas for size, felt revolutionary.

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pagewanted=all. 17 “smaller and smaller and faster and faster”: Thomas Friedman, The Lexus and the Olive Tree (New York: Random House, 2000), 141. 18 “closes the loop on pecuniary self-interest”: Clive Thompson, interview with author, Brooklyn, NY, Aug. 13, 2010. 18 “Customers are always right, but people aren’t”: Lee Siegel, Against the Machine: Being Human in the Age of the Electronic Mob (New York: Spiegel and Grau, 2008), 161. 18 thirty-six hours a week watching TV: “Americans Using TV and Internet Together 35% More Than A Year Ago,” Nielsen Wire, Mar. 22, 2010, accessed Dec. 19, 2010, http://blog.nielsen.com/nielsenwire/online_mobile/three-screen-report-q409. 19 “civilization of Mind in cyberspace”: John Perry Barlow, “A Cyberspace Independence Declaration,” Feb. 9, 1996, accessed Dec. 19, 2010, http://w2.eff.org/Censorship/Internet_censorship_bills/barlow_0296.declaration. 19 “code is law”: Lawrence Lessig, Code 2.0 (New York: Basic Books, 2006), 5. Chapter One: The Race for Relevance 21 “If you’re not paying for something”: MetaFilter blog, accessed Dec. 10, 2010, www.metafilter.com/95152/Userdriven-discontent. 22 “vary sex, violence, and political leaning”: Nicholas Negroponte, Being Digital (New York: Knopf, 1995), 46. 22 “the Daily Me”: Ibid., 151. 22 “Intelligent agents are the unequivocal future”: Negroponte, Mar. 1, 1995, e-mail to the editor, Wired.com, Mar. 3, 1995, www.wired.com/wired/archive/3.03/negroponte.html. 23 “The agent question looms”: Jaron Lanier, “Agents of Alienation,” accessed Jan. 30, 2011, www.jaronlanier.com/agentalien.html 24 twenty-five worst tech products: Dan Tynan, “The 25 Worst Tech Products of All Time,” PC World, May 26, 2006, accessed Dec. 10, 2010, www.pcworld.com/article/125772-3/the_25_worst_tech_products_of_all_time.html#bob. 24 invested over $100 million: Dawn Kawamoto, “Newsmaker: Riding the next technology wave,” CNET News, Oct. 2, 2003, accessed Jan. 30, 2011, http://news.cnet.com/2008-7351-5085423.html. 25 “he’s a lot like John Irving”: Robert Spector, Get Big Fast (New York: HarperBusiness, 2000), 142. 25 “small Artificial Intelligence company”: Ibid., 145. 26 surprised to find them at the top: Ibid., 27. 26 Random House, controlled only 10 percent: Ibid., 25. 26 so many of them—3 million active titles: Ibid., 25. 27 They called their field “cybernetics”: Barnabas D.

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Chapter Four: The You Loop 109 “what a personal computer really is”: Sharon Gaudin, “Total Recall: Storing Every Life Memory in a Surrogate Brain,” ComputerWorld, Aug. 2, 2008, accessed Dec. 15, 2010, www.computerworld.com/s/article/9074439/Total_Recall_Storing_every_life_memory_in_a_surrogate_brain. 109 “You have one identity”: David Kirkpatrick, The Facebook Effect: The Inside Story of the Company That Is Connecting the World (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2010), 199. 109 “I behave a different way”: “Live-Blog: Zuckerberg and David Kirkpatrick on the Facebook Effect,” transcript of interview, Social Beat, accessed Dec. 15, 2010, http://venturebeat.com/2010/07/21/live-blog-zuckerberg-and-david-kirkpatrick-on-the-facebook-effect. 110 “Same awkward self”: Ibid. 110 that would be the norm: Marshall Kirkpatrick, “Facebook Exec: All Media Will Be Personalized in 3 to 5 Years,” ReadWriteWeb, Sept. 29, 2010, accessed Dec. 15, 2010, www.readwriteweb.com/archives/facebook_exec_all_media_will_be_personalized_in_3.php. 110 “a world that all may enter”: John Perry Barlow, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Feb. 8, 1996, accessed Dec. 15, 2010, https://projects.eff.org/~barlow/Declaration-Final.html. 111 pseudonym with the real name: Julia Angwin and Steve Stecklow, “‘Scrapers’ Dig Deep for Data on Web,” Wall Street Journal, Oct. 12, 2010, accessed Dec. 15, 2010, http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703358504575544381288117888.html. 111 tied to the individual people who use them: Julia Angwin and Jennifer Valentino-Devries, “Race Is On to ‘Fingerprint’ Phones, PCs,” Wall Street Journal, Nov. 30, 2010, accessed Jan. 30, 2011, http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704679204575646704100959546.html?

The Curse of Bigness: Antitrust in the New Gilded Age by Tim Wu

AltaVista, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, Big Tech, collective bargaining, corporate personhood, corporate raider, creative destruction, Donald Trump, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, move fast and break things, new economy, open economy, Peter Thiel, Plato's cave, price discrimination, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, The Chicago School

What else could one conclude when, in the 2000s, a tiny blog could outdo an established media outlet? When startups seemed to come from nowhere, gain millions of users overnight, and make their founders and employees wealthier than the old school tycoons? The man who described the mood was author John Perry Barlow, who in the 1990s implored those interested in cyberspace to “imagine a place where trespassers leave no footprints, where goods can be stolen an infinite number of times and yet remain in the possession of their original owners, where businesses you never heard of can own the history of your personal affairs, where only children feel completely at home, where the physics is that of thought rather than things, and where everyone is as virtual as the shadows in Plato’s cave.”

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Gustavo Grullon et al. (2015), available at http://finance.eller.arizona.edu/sites/finance/files/grullon_11.4.16.pdf. 115 studies by the Council of Economic Advisors: “Benefits of Competition and Indicators of Market Power,” Council of Economic Advisors Issue Brief (2016), available at https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/sites/default/files/page/files/20160414_cea_competition_issue_brief.pdf. 115 an independent study by the Economist: “Corporate Concentration,” The Economist, March 24, 2016. 115 The OECD, in its own: “Market Concentration,” OECD Issues paper by the Secretariat (2018), available at https://one.oecd.org/document/DAF/COMP/WD(2018)46/en/pdf. 117 “an antitrust division in the Justice Department”: Barack Obama (speech, Oregon, May 18, 2008), Reuters. CHAPTER SEVEN 119 “imagine a place where trespassers leave no footprints”: “Electronic Frontier: Coming Into the Country,” John Perry Barlow, Communications of the ACM, January 1991. 122 Instagram “allows people to do what they like to do on Facebook”: “Instagram Was Facebook’s Biggest Threat,”Nicholas Carlson, Business Insider, April 9, 2012. 122 “Buying Instagram conveyed to investors”: “Here’s Proof that Instagram Was One of the Smartest Acquisitions Ever,” Victor Luckerson, TIME, April 19, 2016. 124 “the most popular messaging app”: “A Year Later, $19 Billion for WhatsApp Doesn’t Sound So Crazy,” Josh Constine, TechCrunch, Feb. 19, 2015. 124 “Without this acquisition”: “Facebook’s WhatsApp Acquisition Exposes Grave Risks to the Business Model,” Seeking Alpha, Feb. 20, 2014. 126 “monopoly profits”: “Competition Is for Losers,” Peter Thiel, Wall Street Journal, Sept. 12, 2014. 126 “bringing the world closer together”: “Facebook Careers,” Facebook. 126 “different kind of company”: “Facebook Careers,” various job postings, Facebook.

The Great Firewall of China by James Griffiths;

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, bike sharing, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, borderless world, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Chelsea Manning, Citizen Lab, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, digital rights, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, gig economy, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, jimmy wales, John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, megaproject, microaggression, Mikhail Gorbachev, Mitch Kapor, mobile money, Occupy movement, pets.com, profit motive, QR code, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, South China Sea, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, technoutopianism, The future is already here, undersea cable, WikiLeaks, zero day

Jarnow, Heads: a biography of psychedelic America, Cambridge MA: Da Capo Press, 2016. 19K. Drum, ‘A profile of Dick Cheney’, Washington Monthly, 9 November 2003, https://washingtonmonthly.com/2003/11/09/a-profile-of-dick-cheney/ 20J. Barlow, ‘Lyrics by John Perry Barlow’, Electronic Frontier Foundation, 1990, https://web.archive.org/web/20180208000604/https://w2.eff.org/Misc/Publications/John_Perry_Barlow/HTML/barlows_lyrics.html 21Goldsmith and Wu, Who Controls the Internet?, p. 17. 22J. Barlow, ‘The economy of ideas’, Wired, 1 March 1994, https://www.wired.com/1994/03/economy-ideas/ 23J. Barlow, ‘Decrypting the puzzle palace’, Communications of the ACM, July 1992, http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/classes/6.805/articles/digital-telephony/Barlow_decrypting_puzzle_palace.html 24Goldsmith and Wu, Who Controls the Internet?

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The Github incident was for many outside China the first hint they had of the ideology behind this resurgence in censorship, one that would come to define how China views the web both at home and globally: the doctrine of cyber-sovereignty. * It wasn’t supposed to end up like this. The early evangelists of the internet preached absolute freedom from government control. The web, they said, would route around censorship, making it the ultimate Pandora’s box for repressive regimes. As the late cyberlibertarian John Perry Barlow wrote: Governments 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. We have no elected government, nor are we likely to have one, so I address you with no greater authority than that with which liberty itself always speaks.

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As academics Tim Wu and Jack Goldsmith write, in the 1990s, “[I]t was widely believed that cyberspace might challenge the authority of nation-states and move the world to a new post-territorial system.”17 That system would be governed not by law, but by code. * One of the leading advocates of a cyber utopia free from nation states and their laws was John Perry Barlow, perhaps the weirdest and most unlikely of the many eccentrics and free thinkers active in the early days of the internet. Barlow was born in Wyoming in 1947 to a well-off family of devout Mormons; when he was growing up, the only TV he was allowed to watch was religious programming, and even that wasn’t until he turned eleven.18 John’s father, Norman Barlow, was a Republican state legislator, and John himself later ran Dick Cheney’s first congressional campaign,19 before eventually breaking with the Republican Party after it was taken over by Cheney’s very own brand of foreign interventionism and neoconservatism.

The End of Big: How the Internet Makes David the New Goliath by Nicco Mele

4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Andy Carvin, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, big-box store, bitcoin, bread and circuses, business climate, call centre, Cass Sunstein, centralized clearinghouse, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, collaborative editing, commoditize, Computer Lib, creative destruction, crony capitalism, cross-subsidies, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, death of newspapers, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, en.wikipedia.org, Evgeny Morozov, Exxon Valdez, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, Firefox, global supply chain, Google Chrome, Gordon Gekko, Hacker Ethic, Ian Bogost, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, lolcat, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, military-industrial complex, minimum viable product, Mitch Kapor, Mohammed Bouazizi, Mother of all demos, Narrative Science, new economy, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, old-boy network, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), peer-to-peer, period drama, Peter Thiel, pirate software, public intellectual, publication bias, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, satellite internet, Seymour Hersh, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, social web, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, Ted Nelson, Ted Sorensen, Telecommunications Act of 1996, telemarketer, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, transaction costs, uranium enrichment, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, Zipcar

The following year, Congress passed the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which deregulated the radio spectrum, allowing, among other things, the rise of huge media conglomerates like Clear Channel (paradoxical, I know). The underlying philosophy received memorable expression in a piece written by the technologist, cattle rancher, and Grateful Dead lyricist John Perry Barlow called “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace.” The piece begins, “Governments 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.

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But we also need to steer clear of solutions that, although alluring on their surface, apply the basic thinking of the techno-nerds who brought us radical connectivity. In chapter 1, I explained how nerd history carries an implicit critique of institutions and an empowerment of the individual. John Perry Barlow’s manifesto (“Governments 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.”34) is a reminder of the radical mind-set that helped create our current moment in technology and of its potential relevance to government.

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I’ve met him, even spent some time with him, and he is an honest, genuine man working hard to do good. Yet I’m concerned with the ideological, anti-institutional thread running through connective technology, from Ted Nelson’s “Computer Lib” in the ’70s, to Steve Jobs’s literal and metaphorical 1984, to John Perry Barlow’s declaration of independence in the ’90s, up to Craigslist today. What if government adopted Craigslist’s core philosophies? True to the Craigslist ethos, customer service would be paramount. Newmark famously talks about himself as nothing more than a customer service representative. But this hands-off ethos got Craigslist into trouble as it became the primary online marketplace for prostitution and paid sex—a part of the explosion of the trafficking of women and children across borders that has skyrocketed over the last decade.37 It’s one of the downsides of the hands-off ideology that Craigslist adheres to.

This Machine Kills Secrets: Julian Assange, the Cypherpunks, and Their Fight to Empower Whistleblowers by Andy Greenberg

air gap, Apple II, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Bletchley Park, Burning Man, Chelsea Manning, computerized markets, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, disinformation, domain-specific language, driverless car, drone strike, en.wikipedia.org, Evgeny Morozov, Fairchild Semiconductor, fault tolerance, hive mind, information security, Jacob Appelbaum, John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Lewis Mumford, Mahatma Gandhi, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Mohammed Bouazizi, Mondo 2000, Neal Stephenson, nuclear winter, offshore financial centre, operational security, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, profit motive, Ralph Nader, real-name policy, reality distortion field, Richard Stallman, Robert Hanssen: Double agent, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, social graph, SQL injection, statistical model, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Teledyne, three-masted sailing ship, undersea cable, Vernor Vinge, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, We are the 99%, WikiLeaks, X Prize, Zimmermann PGP

And when the attacks on WikiLeaks began in December 2010, it was Anonymous that attacked back. The requisite manifesto broadcast through the Internet’s message board and blogs called for an action titled “Operation Avenge Assange.” It appeared shortly after PayPal cut off transfers to the group and quoted John Perry Barlow, a founder of the cypherpunk-affiliated Electronic Frontier Foundation: “The first serious infowar is now engaged. The field of battle is WikiLeaks. You are the troops.” The poster went on to call for boycotts and cyberattacks, mass distribution of the cables online and off, and even a letter-writing campaign to government officials in support of Assange.

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After that first installment in the series, Yordanov learned that someone in Burgas was trying a different censorship tactic, purchasing every issue of the paper from the distributor before it could be delivered to newsstands. When the next issue came out, he drove to the distributor early in the morning, filled his car with papers, and handed them out himself to local retailers. Yordanov’s brazenness didn’t go unnoticed. It would nearly cost him his life. If John Perry Barlow ever wrote a résumé—and he’s probably not the type who ever has—it would list seventeen years of cattle ranching in Wyoming, a few decades of writing lyrics for the Grateful Dead, experimenting with LSD alongside Timothy Leary, and cofounding the Electronic Frontier Foundation. But science fiction author Bruce Sterling once named Barlow’s primary profession as that of a poet, in the sense that Percy Shelley once described poets: “the unacknowledged legislators of the world.”

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Better to go after a public figure and bring attention to the problem than let the cherry-picking of private individuals’ data by the American government continue in secret, she says. Even so, the legal threats that have obtained her private data and prevented Jónsdóttir from traveling to the United States since the investigation began represent a problem for IMMI too. The Internet doesn’t reside in some abstract “cyberspace” of John Perry Barlow’s gospel and Tim May’s sci-fi imagining. Much of it, like Jónsdóttir’s Twitter data, resides in the United States. And until it physically moves to Iceland, it won’t be protected by IMMI’s laws. As legal blogger Arthur Bright pointed out when IMMI first surfaced, a media or technology company would have to relocate all of its staff and assets to Iceland or face the reality that its people and property back at home would be subject to the same archaic media laws as always.

Surveillance Valley: The Rise of the Military-Digital Complex by Yasha Levine

23andMe, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Adam Curtis, Airbnb, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, Anne Wojcicki, anti-communist, AOL-Time Warner, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, borderless world, Boston Dynamics, British Empire, Californian Ideology, call centre, Charles Babbage, Chelsea Manning, cloud computing, collaborative editing, colonial rule, company town, computer age, computerized markets, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, digital map, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dr. Strangelove, drone strike, dual-use technology, Edward Snowden, El Camino Real, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, end-to-end encryption, fake news, fault tolerance, gentrification, George Gilder, ghettoisation, global village, Google Chrome, Google Earth, Google Hangouts, Greyball, Hacker Conference 1984, Howard Zinn, hypertext link, IBM and the Holocaust, index card, Jacob Appelbaum, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Laura Poitras, life extension, Lyft, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, Norbert Wiener, off-the-grid, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), packet switching, PageRank, Paul Buchheit, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, plutocrats, private military company, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, slashdot, Snapchat, Snow Crash, SoftBank, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Susan Wojcicki, Telecommunications Act of 1996, telepresence, telepresence robot, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Hackers Conference, Tony Fadell, uber lyft, vertical integration, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, WikiLeaks

Its faith that the Internet constituted a revolution in human affairs legitimated calls for telecommunications deregulation and the dismantling of government entitlement programs elsewhere as well,” remarks Fred Turner in From Counterculture to Cyberculture while examining Wired’s place in the deregulatory and privatization frenzy of the 1990s. 106. John Perry Barlow, “Jack In, Young Pioneer!” (keynote essay for the 1994 Computerworld College Edition, August 11, 1994), https://w2.eff.org/Misc /Publications/John_Perry_Barlow/HTML/jack_in_young_pioneer.html. 107. “Louis Rossetto,” Charlie Rose, season 1996, episode 01.24.96 (Arlington, VA: PBS, January 24, 1996). 108. Brand, “SPACEWAR.” Chapter 5 1. The story of Sergey Brin’s search for terrorists in Google’s logs comes from I’m Feeling Lucky: The Confessions of Google Employee Number 59, an amazing insider account by former Google employee Douglas Edwards.

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Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron, “The Californian Ideology,” Mute Magazine, September 1995, http://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/californian-ideology. 102. The Electronic Frontier Foundation was founded by Lotus Notes creator Mitch Kapor, cattle rancher and Grateful Dead songwriter John Perry Barlow, and early Sun Microsystems employee John Gilmore. It started out with a vague mission: to defend people’s civil liberties on the Internet and to “find a way of preserving the ideology of the 1960s” in the digital era. From its first days, EFF had deep pockets and featured an impressive roster: Stewart Brand and Apple’s Steve Wozniak were board members, while press outreach was conducted by Cathy Cook, who had done public relations for Steve Jobs.

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Discussion on Anonymizer’s intelligence work comes from leaked emails of another intelligence contractor, HBGary, which was hacked by Anonymous (Aaron Barr, “Re: this guy’s program is blown?” email message, July 1, 2010, https://surveillancevalley.com/content/citations/aaron-barr-aaron%40hbgary.com-re-this-guy-s-program-is-blown-1-july-2010.pdf). 24. John Perry Barlow, “Why Spy?” Forbes.com, October 7, 2002, https://www.forbes.com/asap/2002/1007/042.html. 25. A 2005 Wired profile of Tor and Roger Dingledine written by Kim Zetter offered a perfect example of how Tor’s military origins and funding were treated in those early years. Although the article discussed Tor’s origins as a US Navy project designed to hide spies online, it made no mention of Tor’s ongoing military funding and painted Dingledine and his partner Mathewson as independent programmers who had taken a half-baked technology, rebuilt it independently, and released it into the wild.

The Internet Trap: How the Digital Economy Builds Monopolies and Undermines Democracy by Matthew Hindman

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, accounting loophole / creative accounting, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, barriers to entry, Benjamin Mako Hill, bounce rate, business logic, Cambridge Analytica, cloud computing, computer vision, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, death of newspapers, deep learning, DeepMind, digital divide, discovery of DNA, disinformation, Donald Trump, fake news, fault tolerance, Filter Bubble, Firefox, future of journalism, Ida Tarbell, incognito mode, informal economy, information retrieval, invention of the telescope, Jeff Bezos, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, lake wobegon effect, large denomination, longitudinal study, loose coupling, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Metcalfe’s law, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, Network effects, New Economic Geography, New Journalism, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, Pepsi Challenge, performance metric, power law, price discrimination, recommendation engine, Robert Metcalfe, search costs, selection bias, Silicon Valley, Skype, sparse data, speech recognition, Stewart Brand, surveillance capitalism, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, The Chicago School, the long tail, The Soul of a New Machine, Thomas Malthus, web application, Whole Earth Catalog, Yochai Benkler

Media competition and coexistence: the theory of the niche. New York: Routledge. Dixit, A. K., and Stiglitz, J. E. (1977). Monopolistic competition and optimum product diversity. American Economic Review, 67 (3), 297–308. Doherty, B. (2004, August). John Perry Barlow 2.0. Reason. Retrieved from https://reason .com/archives/2004/08/01/john-perry-barlow-20. Downs, A. (1957). An economic theory of democracy. New York: Harper. Dyson, F. (2004). A meeting with Enrico Fermi. Nature, 427, 297. Earl, J., and Kimport, K. (2011). Digitally enabled social change: activism in the Internet age. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

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Growing the digital newspaper audience is still possible—but we need to hurry. 8 The “Nature” of the Internet The best products don’t win. The ones everyone use[s] win. I know a lot of people don’t want to hear this. . . . But make no mistake, growth tactics are how we got here. —Facebook Vice President Andrew Bosworth, internal memo titled “The Ugly,” June 18, 2016 In February 1996 John Perry Barlow, best known as a lyricist for the Grateful Dead, published a short manifesto titled “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace.” In turgid prose that recalled Hegel more than Jefferson, Barlow asserted that the internet was immune to regulation and entirely divorced from the “Industrial World.”1 The internet was “the new home of Mind,” where “whatever the human mind may create can be reproduced and distributed infinitely at no cost.

Consumed: How Markets Corrupt Children, Infantilize Adults, and Swallow Citizens Whole by Benjamin R. Barber

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, addicted to oil, AltaVista, American ideology, An Inconvenient Truth, AOL-Time Warner, Berlin Wall, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, bread and circuses, business cycle, Celebration, Florida, collective bargaining, creative destruction, David Brooks, delayed gratification, digital divide, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, Dr. Strangelove, G4S, game design, George Gilder, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Herbert Marcuse, Hernando de Soto, illegal immigration, informal economy, invisible hand, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, laissez-faire capitalism, late capitalism, liberal capitalism, Marc Andreessen, McJob, microcredit, Naomi Klein, new economy, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, nuclear winter, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Paradox of Choice, pattern recognition, presumed consent, profit motive, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, retail therapy, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, SimCity, spice trade, Steve Jobs, telemarketer, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, the market place, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas L Friedman, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, Tyler Cowen, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, X Prize

Still more recently, they were the pioneers of the electronic and digital revolution, Silicon Valley cowboys who made the imaginative leaps and took the risks in the 1960s and 1970s that allowed the consolidators and businessmen who established the monopolies and made the fortunes in the 1980s and 1990s to flourish. These were not the Bill Gateses of the cyberworld, but people like novelist William Gibson, John Perry Barlow (who wrote lyrics for the Grateful Dead), and the great cyber-pioneer Norbert Wiener. There is perhaps no better American model of this precapitalist swash-buckler archetype than John D. Rockefeller’s father. On his way to depicting the life of John D., biographer Ron Chernow offers a sidebar portrait of William Rockefeller that captures America’s precapitalist prelude right after the Civil War and immediately before the great capitalist breakout that would be called the Gilded Age.

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In this sense, early capitalist economies resemble the digital economy of the 1990s where technological ingenuity and invention outran by far the potential need for what was being engineered, leading to a boom-bust cycle still being played out. If (see below) Bill Gates plays Rockefeller to information capitalism’s golden age, crazies, prophets, and adventurers like William Gibson and John Perry Barlow are, as I have already suggested, its digital wildcatters and electronic swashbucklers. If each epoch in capitalism’s evolving story is represented by a civic prototype, the period of prelude can be said to feature an anticivic prototype—the outlaw innocent, the romantic anarchist. His values are radical individualist, often anarchistic, displaying an obliviousness to if not a disdain for conventions and mores.

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It was a field with pioneers aplenty, a plethora of brilliant people with ingenious ideas going all the way back to the father of modern cybernetics, Norbert Wiener of MIT. There were mathematicians like John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz, who invented BASIC but never managed to commercialize their work, as well as other visionaries who either lacked the technical expertise (William Gibson or John Perry Barlow, for example), or creators like Ed Roberts, the inventor of the Altair 8800, whose careers floundered as their fledging companies were bought up before the big money was made. The creator of the Cray Supercomputers, Seymour Cray, built what many people regarded as the best computers in the world, only to see his company go under and his own personal fortune vanish.

The Future of the Internet: And How to Stop It by Jonathan Zittrain

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, algorithmic bias, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Andy Kessler, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, book scanning, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, c2.com, call centre, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, Citizen Lab, Clayton Christensen, clean water, commoditize, commons-based peer production, corporate governance, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, digital divide, disruptive innovation, distributed generation, en.wikipedia.org, end-to-end encryption, Firefox, folksonomy, Free Software Foundation, game design, Hacker Ethic, Howard Rheingold, Hush-A-Phone, illegal immigration, index card, informal economy, information security, Internet Archive, jimmy wales, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, license plate recognition, loose coupling, mail merge, Morris worm, national security letter, old-boy network, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), OSI model, packet switching, peer-to-peer, post-materialism, pre–internet, price discrimination, profit maximization, radical decentralization, Ralph Nader, RFC: Request For Comment, RFID, Richard Stallman, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Robert Bork, Robert X Cringely, SETI@home, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, software patent, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Ted Nelson, Telecommunications Act of 1996, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tragedy of the Commons, web application, wikimedia commons, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game

But with the right tools, users can also see themselves as participants in the shaping of generative space—as netizens. This is a crucial reconception of what it means to go online. The currency of cyberspace is, after all, ideas, and we shortchange ourselves if we think of ideas to be, in the words of Electronic Frontier Foundation co-founder John Perry Barlow, merely “another industrial product, no more noble than pig iron,”14 broadcast to us for our consumption but not capable of also being shaped by us. If we insist on treating the Net as an invisible conduit, capable of greater or lesser bandwidth but otherwise meant to be invisible, we naturally turn to service providers with demands to keep it working, even when the problems arising are social in nature.

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REV. 229, 280 (1998) (“[P]erfect enforcement is rarely the optimal level of enforcement.”). 44. See David R. Johnson & David G. Post, Law and Borders—The Rise of Law in Cyberspace, 48 STAN. L. REV. 1367, 1367, 1383, 1387—88 (1996) (arguing that self-governance can and should be central to cyberspace regulation); John Perry Barlow, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace (Feb. 8, 1996), http://homes.eff.org/~barlow/Declaration-Final.html (“Governments 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.

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., Clifford Shearing & Jennifer Wood, Governing Security for Common Goods, 31 INT. J. SOC. L. 205 (2003). However, there are criticisms of such community initiatives. In this view, there need to be structures in place to protect minority views within the communities, otherwise their rights can be trampled. 14. John Perry Barlow, A Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace (Feb. 8, 1996), http://homes.eff.org/-barlow/Declaration-Final.html. 15. See, e.g., Kevin R. Pinkney, Putting Blame Where Blame Is Due: Software Manufacturer and Customer Liability for Security-Related Software Failure, 13 ALB. L.J. SCI. & TECH. 43, 46 (2002) (arguing that software makers should be liable for exploited security vulnerabilities). 16.

The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future by Kevin Kelly

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Aaron Swartz, AI winter, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Web Services, augmented reality, bank run, barriers to entry, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, bitcoin, blockchain, book scanning, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, cloud computing, commoditize, computer age, Computer Lib, connected car, crowdsourcing, dark matter, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, dematerialisation, Downton Abbey, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Filter Bubble, Freestyle chess, Gabriella Coleman, game design, Geoffrey Hinton, Google Glasses, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, index card, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invention of movable type, invisible hand, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, lifelogging, linked data, Lyft, M-Pesa, machine readable, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Marshall McLuhan, Mary Meeker, means of production, megacity, Minecraft, Mitch Kapor, multi-sided market, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, off-the-grid, old-boy network, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, personalized medicine, placebo effect, planetary scale, postindustrial economy, Project Xanadu, recommendation engine, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, robo advisor, Rodney Brooks, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, slashdot, Snapchat, social graph, social web, software is eating the world, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steven Levy, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, The future is already here, the long tail, the scientific method, transport as a service, two-sided market, Uber for X, uber lyft, value engineering, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WeWork, Whole Earth Review, Yochai Benkler, yottabyte, zero-sum game

When masses of people who own the means of production work toward a common goal and share their products in common, when they contribute labor without wages and enjoy the fruits free of charge, it’s not unreasonable to call that new socialism. What they have in common is the verb “to share.” In fact, some futurists have called this economic aspect of the new socialism the “sharing economy” because the primary currency in this realm is sharing. • • • In the late 1990s, activist, provocateur, and aging hippy John Perry Barlow began calling this drift, somewhat tongue in cheek, “dot-communism.” He defined dot-communism as a “workforce composed entirely of free agents,” a decentralized gift or barter economy without money where there is no ownership of property and where technological architecture defines the political space.

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tracks nearly 150 wiki engines today: “Wiki Engines,” accessed June 24, 2015, http://goo.gl/5auMv6. billion instances of Creative Commons: “State of the Commons,” Creative Commons, accessed May 2, 2015. “dot-communism”: Theta Pavis, “The Rise of Dot-Communism,” Wired, October 25, 1999. “composed entirely of free agents”: Roshni Jayakar, “Interview: John Perry Barlow, Founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation,” Business Today, December 6, 2000, accessed July 30, 2015, via Internet Archive, April 24, 2006. ranked by the increasing degree of coordination: Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations (New York: Penguin Press, 2008). 1.8 billion per day: Mary Meeker, “Internet Trends 2014—Code Conference,” Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, 2014.

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“as smart as everyone”: Larry Keeley, “Ten Commandments for Success on the Net,” Fast Company, June 30, 1996. as Clay Shirky puts it: Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations (New York: Penguin Press, 2008). “Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace”: John Perry Barlow, “Declaring Independence,” Wired 4(6), June 1996. $24 billion in 2015: Steven Perlberg, “Social Media Ad Spending to Hit $24 Billion This Year,” Wall Street Journal, April 15, 2015. tried to harness readers’ reports: Rachel McAthy, “Lessons from the Guardian’s Open Newslist Trial,” Journalism.co.uk, July 9, 2012.

Move Fast and Break Things: How Facebook, Google, and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy by Jonathan Taplin

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "there is no alternative" (TINA), 1960s counterculture, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, American Legislative Exchange Council, AOL-Time Warner, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, back-to-the-land, barriers to entry, basic income, battle of ideas, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, Big Tech, bitcoin, Brewster Kahle, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, Clayton Christensen, Cody Wilson, commoditize, content marketing, creative destruction, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, data is the new oil, data science, David Brooks, David Graeber, decentralized internet, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, equal pay for equal work, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, future of journalism, future of work, George Akerlof, George Gilder, Golden age of television, Google bus, Hacker Ethic, Herbert Marcuse, Howard Rheingold, income inequality, informal economy, information asymmetry, information retrieval, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jacob Silverman, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, labor-force participation, Larry Ellison, life extension, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, military-industrial complex, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Norbert Wiener, offshore financial centre, packet switching, PalmPilot, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, pre–internet, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, recommendation engine, rent-seeking, revision control, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Ross Ulbricht, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, secular stagnation, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skinner box, smart grid, Snapchat, Social Justice Warrior, software is eating the world, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, tech billionaire, techno-determinism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Chicago School, the long tail, The Market for Lemons, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transfer pricing, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, unpaid internship, vertical integration, We are as Gods, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, web application, Whole Earth Catalog, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, you are the product

The notion of the “hacker ethic” became a contested trope. It started with an online forum on the WELL organized by Harper’s Magazine. The subject was hacking, and Paul Tough, a Harper’s editor, had recruited Brand and a few of his most important WELL members, including Howard Rheingold, Kevin Kelly, and John Perry Barlow, to participate. Barlow, a shaggy, bearded man with a fondness for colorful cowboy shirts, is a true American character. He is a failed Wyoming rancher, a former Catholic mystic, and a former Grateful Dead lyricist. He was also an early proponent of cyberspace as the new American frontier—as lawless as Wyatt Earp’s Tombstone.

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The online security firm Cloudflare reported that “94% of requests that we see across the Tor network are per se malicious.” Like the Internet itself, the onion router was originally developed with funds from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) for the purpose of protecting US intelligence communications. Subsequently, funding for Tor came in part from John Perry Barlow’s Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), the organization willing to defend the darkest conduct on the Web in the name of free speech. When University of Portsmouth computer science researcher Gareth Owen began a study of the Dark Web, he assumed it was mainly a place for political activism and anonymous whistle-blowing—the very activities EFF said it was supporting.

Dawn of the New Everything: Encounters With Reality and Virtual Reality by Jaron Lanier

4chan, air gap, augmented reality, back-to-the-land, Big Tech, Bill Atkinson, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, carbon footprint, cloud computing, collaborative editing, commoditize, Computer Lib, cosmological constant, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, deep learning, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Hofstadter, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, fake news, Firefox, game design, general-purpose programming language, gig economy, Google Glasses, Grace Hopper, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hacker Ethic, Hans Moravec, Howard Rheingold, hype cycle, impulse control, information asymmetry, intentional community, invisible hand, Ivan Sutherland, Jaron Lanier, John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Kuiper Belt, lifelogging, mandelbrot fractal, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Minecraft, Mitch Kapor, Mondo 2000, Mother of all demos, Murray Gell-Mann, Neal Stephenson, Netflix Prize, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, Oculus Rift, pattern recognition, Paul Erdős, peak TV, Plato's cave, profit motive, Project Xanadu, quantum cryptography, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, recommendation engine, Richard Feynman, Richard Stallman, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skinner box, Skype, Snapchat, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, telemarketer, telepresence, telepresence robot, Thorstein Veblen, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, WikiLeaks, wikimedia commons

Toward the end of my tenure, VPL got big enough that I no longer knew everyone. We outgrew our cute marina. (If you live in Silicon Valley, you know that tall building to the south of where the San Mateo Bridge alights on the peninsula? The one with the big octagonal window at the top? That was us.) Mr. John Perry Barlow, who prides himself on having radar for fascinating women, would tell me about interesting women who worked there whom I never met. A single lass who looked like Audrey Hepburn and descended from Albert Camus? Maybe she was there, who knows? I didn’t just encounter new people, but new versions of myself at VPL.

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Meanwhile, norms for tech journalism became hell-bent on positivity. VR engaged a new generation of journalists, like Steven Levy, Howard Rheingold, Luc Sante, and Mondo 2000’s Ken Goffman, aka R. U. Sirius. I’ll highlight two figures who were particularly influential as well as dear to me: Kevin Kelly and John Perry Barlow. Kevin is a fine example of a trusted friend with whom I disagree completely. When I met him, he was editing and writing in publications connected to Stewart Brand’s world, post–Whole Earth Catalog; he later became the first editor in chief of Wired. Kevin thinks that objects we perceive to exist in software really exist.

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I was delighted to provide a blurb for his book What Technology Wants, stating that it was the best presentation of a philosophy I didn’t share. Kevin remembers that we all came upon our ideas just now, let’s say three minutes ago. We shouldn’t treat our ideas about computation as hallowed. He has a sense of humor and an open mind. John Perry Barlow claims to have a perfect memory of meeting me at a hacker retreat, but I can prove I wasn’t there. It’s weird, because he’s supposed to be the one with crystal-clear memory of everything, and I’m supposed to be the one living in a fog. Barlow and I got close fast; we have a lot in common. He had been a rancher in Wyoming and found fancy city life to be as much of a put-on as I did.

The Smartphone Society by Nicole Aschoff

"Susan Fowler" uber, 4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, Amazon Web Services, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, carbon footprint, Carl Icahn, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, cloud computing, correlation does not imply causation, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, degrowth, Demis Hassabis, deplatforming, deskilling, digital capitalism, digital divide, do what you love, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, feminist movement, Ferguson, Missouri, Filter Bubble, financial independence, future of work, gamification, gig economy, global value chain, Google Chrome, Google Earth, Googley, green new deal, housing crisis, income inequality, independent contractor, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jessica Bruder, job automation, John Perry Barlow, knowledge economy, late capitalism, low interest rates, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mark Zuckerberg, minimum wage unemployment, mobile money, moral panic, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Nomadland, occupational segregation, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, PageRank, Patri Friedman, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, pets.com, planned obsolescence, quantitative easing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, Skype, Snapchat, SoftBank, statistical model, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech worker, technological determinism, TED Talk, the scientific method, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, TikTok, transcontinental railway, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, upwardly mobile, Vision Fund, W. E. B. Du Bois, wages for housework, warehouse robotics, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, yottabyte

When Losse asked for clarification Zuckerberg explained, “It means that the best thing to do now, if you want to change the world, is to start a company. It’s the best model for getting things done and bringing your vision to the world.”24 Zuckerberg’s sentiment echoes Electronic Frontier Foundation founding member John Perry Barlow’s oft-cited manifesto: “Governments 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.”25 Peter Thiel shares Zuckerberg’s and Barlow’s desire for autonomy and space to build new Utopias.

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Moazed and Johnson, Modern Monopolies, 62. 19. Brynjolfsson and McAfee, The Second Machine Age, 106. 20. Anderson, “The End of Theory.” 21. Harris, “Inside the First Church of Artificial Intelligence.” 22. O’Gieblyn, “Ghost in the Cloud.” 23. Ullman, Life in Code, 295. 24. Losse, The Boy Kings, 201–2. 25. See John Perry Barlow, “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace,” Electronic Frontier Foundation website, https://www.eff.org/cyberspace-independence. 26. On Fordlandia, see Grandin, Fordlandia. 27. Popper, “A Cryptocurrency Millionaire Wants to Build a Utopia in Nevada.” 28. Trachtenberg, Incorporation of America, 39. 29.

Fire in the Valley: The Birth and Death of the Personal Computer by Michael Swaine, Paul Freiberger

1960s counterculture, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, Apple II, barriers to entry, Bill Atkinson, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Byte Shop, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, commoditize, Computer Lib, computer vision, Dennis Ritchie, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, Fairchild Semiconductor, Gary Kildall, gentleman farmer, Google Chrome, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Hawkins, job automation, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Jony Ive, Ken Thompson, Larry Ellison, Loma Prieta earthquake, Marc Andreessen, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, Mother of all demos, Paul Terrell, popular electronics, Richard Stallman, Robert Metcalfe, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, stealth mode startup, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, Ted Nelson, Tim Cook: Apple, urban sprawl, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Whole Earth Catalog, world market for maybe five computers

One day in the summer of 1990, he even found himself on a cattle ranch in Wyoming talking computers with John Perry Barlow, a former lyricist of the Grateful Dead. What led to that unlikely meeting was a series of events that bode ill for civil liberties in the new wired world. A few months earlier, some anonymous individual, for whatever motive, had “liberated” a piece of the proprietary, secret operating-system code for the Apple Macintosh and had mailed it on floppy disks to influential people in the computer industry. Kapor was one of these people; John Perry Barlow—the former Grateful Dead lyricist, current cattle rancher, and computer gadfly—was not.

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What’s more, most of the millions whose worlds have been utterly transformed by bit-boxes don’t know a thing about their origins. But if you’re going to read one history book this decade, read this one. You need to know the hilarious saga of the wizards and the wing nuts and the little miracles by which they created everybody’s future. → John Perry Barlow Peripheral Visionary executive vice president; Algae Systems cofounder; and rocking chair, Electronic Frontier Foundation This must-read classic tale of the origins of the personal computer and its role in the evolution of Silicon Valley continues to evolve and inform. In an era when we take the personal computer for granted, we tend to forget the risk-taking and ambition that was required to shift from a hobbyist plaything to a thriving industry.

Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest by Zeynep Tufekci

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, 4chan, active measures, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, algorithmic bias, AltaVista, Alvin Toffler, Andy Carvin, anti-communist, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, bread and circuses, British Empire, citizen journalism, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, context collapse, crowdsourcing, digital divide, disinformation, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, feminist movement, Ferguson, Missouri, Filter Bubble, Future Shock, gentrification, Howard Rheingold, income inequality, index card, interchangeable parts, invention of movable type, invention of writing, John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow, loose coupling, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, moral hazard, moral panic, Naomi Klein, Network effects, new economy, obamacare, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, pre–internet, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, real-name policy, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rosa Parks, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, Streisand effect, the strength of weak ties, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, Twitter Arab Spring, We are the 99%, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler

For example, during the early days of the internet, there were many theories that speculated that the internet would make race and gender less important, that our bodies would become irrelevant, and that “cyberspace” would become a place that would be free of bodies, a place where ideas and rationality ruled. Take this early statement by John Perry Barlow in his “Cyberspace Independence Declaration”: We are creating a world that all may enter without privilege or prejudice accorded by race, economic power, military force, or station of birth. We are creating a world where anyone, anywhere may express his or her beliefs, no matter how singular, without fear of being coerced into silence or conformity.

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Massimo Ragnedda and Glenn W. Muschert, The Digital Divide: The Internet and Social Inequality in International Perspective (New York: Routledge, 2013); Eszter Hargittai, “The Digital Divide and What to Do about It,” in New Economy Handbook, ed. Derek C. Jones (San Diego: Academic Press, 2003), 821–39. 25. John Perry Barlow, “A Cyberspace Independence Declaration,” 1996, https://w2.eff.org/Censorship/Internet_censorship_bills/barlow_0296.declaration. 26. In fact, “exclusion” in a digital world implies a whole host of differences from living in a predigital one where nobody was included. It is one thing not to have a telephone number in a world where nobody has one; it is a different thing to be a person without a phone in a world in which it is expected that one will have a phone to perform most basic functions: apply for a job, connect with people, or have a political life.

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The site is not truly anonymous because the site administrators can trace each participant (unless the person uses privacy-preserving options like TOR or VPNs), but they are anonymous to one another and cannot trace posting history. 10. Emily Nussbaum, “Mothers Anonymous,” New York Magazine, July 24, 2006, http://nymag.com/news/features/17668/. 11. Sherry Turkle, Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995). 12. John Perry Barlow, “A Cyberspace Independence Declaration,” 1996, https://w2.eff.org/Censorship/Internet_censorship_bills/barlow_0296.declaration. 13. Jessie Daniels, Cyber Racism: White Supremacy Online and the New Attack on Civil Rights (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2009); Lisa, Nakamura, Cybertypes: Race, Ethnicity, and Identity on the Internet (New York: Routledge, 2002). 14.

Hacking Politics: How Geeks, Progressives, the Tea Party, Gamers, Anarchists and Suits Teamed Up to Defeat SOPA and Save the Internet by David Moon, Patrick Ruffini, David Segal, Aaron Swartz, Lawrence Lessig, Cory Doctorow, Zoe Lofgren, Jamie Laurie, Ron Paul, Mike Masnick, Kim Dotcom, Tiffiniy Cheng, Alexis Ohanian, Nicole Powers, Josh Levy

4chan, Aaron Swartz, Adam Curtis, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Burning Man, call centre, Cass Sunstein, Chelsea Manning, collective bargaining, creative destruction, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, digital rights, disinformation, don't be evil, dual-use technology, facts on the ground, Firefox, Free Software Foundation, Hacker News, hive mind, hockey-stick growth, immigration reform, informal economy, jimmy wales, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, liquidity trap, lolcat, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, obamacare, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, Overton Window, peer-to-peer, plutocrats, power law, prisoner's dilemma, radical decentralization, rent-seeking, Silicon Valley, Skype, Streisand effect, technoutopianism, The future is already here, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator, Yochai Benkler

The best ideas win through vigorous debate and testing. No one has seniority or a veto. There’s no influence peddling or lobbyists. The engineers are allergic to hypocrisy and public relations rhetoric. It’s as pure a form of democracy as has ever been implemented. And it works amazingly well. John Perry Barlow We have no elected government, nor are we likely to have one, so I address you with no greater authority than that with which liberty itself always speaks. I declare the global social space we are building to be naturally independent of the tyrannies you seek to impose on us. You have no moral right to rule us nor do you possess any methods of enforcement we have true reason to fear.

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As a libertarian, I marveled at the complete freedom it afforded its participants. The Internet could serve as a model for self-government. No bureaucrat controlled it, and you didn’t need permission to hit the Publish button. Free speech was finally and truly, free. The words penned by former Grateful Dead lyricist John Perry Barlow, in his Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace (itself issued in the immediate aftermath of the CDA), have stuck with me in the years since: Governments 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.

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The engineers are allergic to hypocrisy and public relations rhetoric. It’s as pure a form of democracy as has ever been implemented. And it works amazingly well. Today’s Internet activists have adopted those engineering principles as their political philosophy. In that sense, their core ideals have not changed much since 1996, when John Perry Barlow published his prophetic “Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace” in response to an equally ill-considered law that banned “indecent” content from the then-primitive World Wide Web (the U.S. Supreme Court quickly threw it out as unconstitutional). “We have no elected government,” Barlow wrote, “nor are we likely to have one, so I address you with no greater authority than that with which liberty itself always speaks.”

Crypto: How the Code Rebels Beat the Government Saving Privacy in the Digital Age by Steven Levy

Albert Einstein, Bletchley Park, Claude Shannon: information theory, cognitive dissonance, Compatible Time-Sharing System, computer age, disinformation, Donald Knuth, Eratosthenes, Extropian, Fairchild Semiconductor, information security, invention of the telegraph, Jim Simons, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, knapsack problem, Marc Andreessen, Mitch Kapor, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Mondo 2000, Network effects, new economy, NP-complete, quantum cryptography, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Simon Singh, Stephen Hawking, Steven Levy, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, web of trust, Whole Earth Catalog, zero-sum game, Zimmermann PGP, éminence grise

One forceful ally was thirty-seven-year-old John Gilmore, a gentle computer hacker with long thinning hair and a wispy beard (when he stood beside Eric Hughes, the two of them looked like a geeky version of the cough-drop-icon Smith Brothers). Gilmore had made a small fortune from being one of the original programmers at Sun Microsystems—he had been employee number five—but left in 1986. In 1990, along with Mitch Kapor and Grateful Dead lyricist John Perry Barlow, he’d founded the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) to enforce civil liberties in the digital age, and had just started a new company called Cygnus Support, devoted to aiding users of free software. His hobby-horse was personal privacy. At a 1991 conference called “Computers, Freedom, and Privacy,” he delivered a speech that anticipated the thoughts of Mays and Hughes—a people’s crypto movement to stave off the government.

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Their campaign speeches might have been about bridges to the future, but Gore’s vision was of an Information Highway to transform the country and indeed the globe. Gore arranged to bring some of the most techno-savvy Senate staffers to the White House to help on digital matters, people like Mike Nelson, a former MIT geophysicist experienced in Info-Highway issues. They were “extremely smart, conscious freedom-lovers,” wrote John Perry Barlow, who got to know them in his role as Electronic Frontier Foundation cofounder. “Hell, a lot of them are Deadheads. I was sure that after they were fully moved in, they’d face down the National Security Agency and the FBI.” Barlow had mistakenly assumed that because the Clinton staffers recognized the opening chords of “Sugar Magnolia,” they’d be immune to top-secret doom lectures from the star-spangled crypto boys at Fort George Meade.

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The briefings with Congress and industry went pretty much as expected: the proposal was received cautiously, even skeptically, but not dismissed out of hand. One legislative staffer complained that when the Clinton people were challenged, they went on the offensive. “Do you want to be responsible for kidnappers?” the Clintonistas would ask, and the legislators would crumble. The sessions with civil liberties groups weren’t so cordial. John Perry Barlow of the Electronic Frontier Foundation got one of those last-minute briefings and couldn’t believe his ears. He felt that his new friends in the White House had been “drinking the Kool-Aid,” a national security version of Jonestown. What particularly offended him was Mike Nelson’s invocation of the classified information he had heard and Barlow had not.

Pax Technica: How the Internet of Things May Set Us Free or Lock Us Up by Philip N. Howard

Aaron Swartz, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, blood diamond, Bretton Woods, Brian Krebs, British Empire, butter production in bangladesh, call centre, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, Citizen Lab, clean water, cloud computing, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, digital map, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, Filter Bubble, Firefox, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Google Earth, Hacker News, Howard Rheingold, income inequality, informal economy, information security, Internet of things, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kibera, Kickstarter, land reform, M-Pesa, Marshall McLuhan, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, mobile money, Mohammed Bouazizi, national security letter, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, obamacare, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, packet switching, pension reform, prediction markets, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, Skype, spectrum auction, statistical model, Stuxnet, Tactical Technology Collective, technological determinism, trade route, Twitter Arab Spring, undersea cable, uranium enrichment, WikiLeaks, zero day

But they are all often dedicated to pushing back on onerous government regulations over their internet access, and some participate in, or eagerly read about, technology issues from the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Center for Democracy and Technology, tweet about the latest reports on their country from the Open Society Foundation or Reporters Without Borders, run Tor Project software quietly on their home equipment, and even participate in training sessions from the Tactical Technology Collective. Even the most banal technology standards in the poorest of countries get scrutinized by civic groups emboldened by John Perry Barlow’s “Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace,” or Hillary Clinton’s arguments that internet freedoms are a foreign policy priority.18 When I visited Tajikistan a few years ago, the government simply didn’t have an employee who was in charge of public-spectrum allocation. The Aga Khan Foundation was providing a staff of three Western-educated computer science interns to help set policy.19 Who would have thought that young civil-society actors would want to weigh in on how the public spectrum gets allocated, or want to attend specialized International Telecommunication Union meetings on internet protocols?

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Rachel Haot, “Open Government Initiatives Helped New Yorkers Stay Connected During Hurricane Sandy,” TechCrunch, January 11, 2013, accessed September 30, 2014, http://techcrunch.com/2013/01/11/data-and-digital-saved-lives-in-nyc-during-hurricane-sandy/. 16. Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2011). 17. “Global Voices,” accessed June 30, 2014, http://globalvoicesonline.org. 18. John Perry Barlows, “Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace,” 1996, accessed September 30, 2014, http://wac.colostate.edu/rhetnet/barlow/barlow_declaration.html; Hillary Clinton, “Internet Freedom: The Prepared Text of Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton’s Speech, Delivered at the Newseum in Washington, DC,” Foreign Policy, January 21, 2010, accessed September 30, 2014, http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2010/01/21/internet_freedom. 19.

The People's Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age by Astra Taylor

"World Economic Forum" Davos, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Aaron Swartz, Alan Greenspan, American Legislative Exchange Council, Andrew Keen, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, big-box store, Brewster Kahle, business logic, Californian Ideology, citizen journalism, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, Community Supported Agriculture, conceptual framework, content marketing, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, cross-subsidies, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, digital capitalism, digital divide, digital Maoism, disinformation, disintermediation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Evgeny Morozov, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, future of journalism, Gabriella Coleman, gentrification, George Gilder, Google Chrome, Google Glasses, hive mind, income inequality, informal economy, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Laura Poitras, lolcat, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, Metcalfe’s law, Naomi Klein, Narrative Science, Network effects, new economy, New Journalism, New Urbanism, Nicholas Carr, oil rush, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, planned obsolescence, plutocrats, post-work, power law, pre–internet, profit motive, recommendation engine, Richard Florida, Richard Stallman, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, slashdot, Slavoj Žižek, Snapchat, social graph, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the long tail, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, vertical integration, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, Works Progress Administration, Yochai Benkler, young professional

However imprecisely the terms are applied, the dichotomy of open versus closed (sometimes presented as freedom versus control) provides the conceptual framework that increasingly underpins much of the current thinking about technology, media, and culture. The fetish for openness can be traced back to the foundational myths of the Internet as a wild, uncontrollable realm. In 1996 John Perry Barlow, the former Grateful Dead lyricist and cattle ranger turned techno-utopian firebrand, released an influential manifesto, “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace,” from Davos, Switzerland, during the World Economic Forum, the annual meeting of the world’s business elite. (“Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind.

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Unencumbered by our fleshy selves and released from the material conditions that constrain them, everyone would be made equal by binary code, free to participate as peers on an open network. “We are creating a world that all may enter without privilege or prejudice accorded by race, economic power, military force, or station of birth. Ours is a world that is both everywhere and nowhere, but it is not where bodies live,” John Perry Barlow wrote in his influential Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace. “The caste system is an artifact of the world of atom,” Nicholas Negroponte declared. Before he reinvented himself as a techno-skeptic, the virtual reality pioneer Jaron Lanier concurred. “The Web was built by millions of people simply because they wanted it, without need, greed, fear, hierarchy, authority figures, ethnic identification, advertising, or any other form of manipulation,” he enthused.

Protocol: how control exists after decentralization by Alexander R. Galloway

Ada Lovelace, airport security, Alvin Toffler, Berlin Wall, bioinformatics, Bretton Woods, Charles Babbage, computer age, Computer Lib, Craig Reynolds: boids flock, Dennis Ritchie, digital nomad, discovery of DNA, disinformation, Donald Davies, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, easy for humans, difficult for computers, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Free Software Foundation, Grace Hopper, Hacker Ethic, Hans Moravec, informal economy, John Conway, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Ken Thompson, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, late capitalism, Lewis Mumford, linear programming, macro virus, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, Menlo Park, moral panic, mutually assured destruction, Norbert Wiener, old-boy network, OSI model, packet switching, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, phenotype, post-industrial society, profit motive, QWERTY keyboard, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Reflections on Trusting Trust, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Stallman, semantic web, SETI@home, stem cell, Steve Crocker, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Ted Nelson, telerobotics, The future is already here, the market place, theory of mind, urban planning, Vannevar Bush, Whole Earth Review, working poor, Yochai Benkler

When poured in a vessel, water will fill the vessel completely; when poured into a computer network, the hacker will enter any space available to him. In fact, possibility often erases the unethical in the mind of the hacker. An anecdote from the legendary hacker Acid Phreak illustrates this well. After being told certain personal details about his rhetorical opponent John Perry Barlow, information that he would later use to obtain Barlow’s credit history, Acid Phreak screamed, “Mr. Barlow: Thank you for posting all I need to know to get your credit information and a whole lot more! Now, who is to blame? ME for getting it or YOU for being such an idiot?!”50 Most hackers would answer: You, for being such an idiot.

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In 1999 Etoy was sued by the Internet toy retailer eToys, who claimed that Internet toy buyers might be confused and potentially offended by the artists’s Web site if they typed E-T-O-Y into their Internet browsers rather than E-T-O-Y-S. Since the artists had been using the name well prior to the toy retailer, many in the art world were upset by the lawsuit. The pro-Etoy position received extensive grassroots support from thousands of Internet users including civil liberties advocate John Perry Barlow and author Douglas Rushkoff. The press was also very supportive of the anti-eToys campaign. 34. See http://www.arts.ucsb.edu/bodiesinc. 35. See http://www.etoy.com. 36. A collection of Etoy stock certificates were exhibited for the first time in New York in the spring of 2000 at Postmasters Gallery.

The Dark Net by Jamie Bartlett

3D printing, 4chan, bitcoin, blockchain, brain emulation, carbon footprint, Cody Wilson, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, degrowth, deindustrialization, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, eternal september, Filter Bubble, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Free Software Foundation, global village, Google Chrome, Great Leap Forward, Howard Rheingold, Internet of things, invention of writing, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kuwabatake Sanjuro: assassination market, Lewis Mumford, life extension, litecoin, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Mondo 2000, moral hazard, moral panic, Nick Bostrom, Occupy movement, pre–internet, printed gun, Ray Kurzweil, rewilding, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, Skype, slashdot, synthetic biology, technological singularity, technoutopianism, Ted Kaczynski, TED Talk, The Coming Technological Singularity, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, WikiLeaks, Zimmermann PGP

Many techno-optimists, such as the cheerleaders for the networked revolution Wired and Mondo 2000 magazines, believed cyberspace would herald a new dawn of learning and understanding, even the end of the national state. The best statement of this view was the American essayist and prominent cyberlibertarian John Perry Barlow’s 1996 ‘Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace’, which announced to the real world that ‘your legal concepts of property, expression, identity, movement, and context do not apply to us . . . our identities have no bodies, so, unlike you, we cannot obtain order by physical coercion.’ Barlow believed that the lack of censorship and the anonymity that the net seemed to offer would foster a freer, more open society, because people could cast off the tyranny of their fixed real-world identities and create themselves anew.

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Many of the net’s early advocates believed that, by enabling people to communicate more freely with each other, it would help to end misunderstanding and hatred. Nicholas Negroponte – former Director of the illustrious MIT Media Lab – declared in 1997 that the internet would bring about world peace, and the end of nationalism. For some, like John Perry Barlow, author of the ‘Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace’, this new, free world could help to create just, humane and liberal societies – better than those ‘weary giants of flesh and steel’. But it was not only the optimists commenting on the possibilities presented by this strange new world.

Social Life of Information by John Seely Brown, Paul Duguid

Alvin Toffler, business process, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, cross-subsidies, disintermediation, double entry bookkeeping, Frank Gehry, frictionless, frictionless market, future of work, George Gilder, George Santayana, global village, Goodhart's law, Howard Rheingold, informal economy, information retrieval, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, junk bonds, Just-in-time delivery, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, lateral thinking, loose coupling, Marshall McLuhan, medical malpractice, Michael Milken, moral hazard, Network effects, new economy, Productivity paradox, Robert Metcalfe, rolodex, Ronald Coase, scientific management, shareholder value, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Superbowl ad, tacit knowledge, Ted Nelson, telepresence, the medium is the message, The Nature of the Firm, the strength of weak ties, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, transaction costs, Turing test, Vannevar Bush, Y2K

Hence the quasi-rural talk of "televillages" and "electronic cottages."2 Somewhere in here, then, is that familiar hope that the road to the future will somehow take us back to the simplicities of the past. Yet other enthusiasts see no reason to stop at the village. The cyberguru and writer John Perry Barlow extols the nomadic life. He was a rancher in Wyoming, but now believes his laptop and cell phone, allowing him to work anywhere, free him from ties to place or community, making him an itinerant citizen of the global village of cyberspace (for which he issued a declaration of independence).3 In all of this, there is a mixture of hype and hope with some quite reasonable forecasting.

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Yet with the digital, while transportation and mobility are enhanced, immutability is diminished. Some documents, such as Web pages, are constantly changing. On the Web it can be very hard to know what the "same document" might mean.48 So some people argue that the old balancing act is over: Fixity has given way to fluidity. And others add, don't worry. John Perry Barlow, for example, argues that with information technology, the economy is shifting over to a service economy of fluid practices, not fixed products.49 A songwriter himself, Barlow claims that musicians must shift their income streams from products and copyrights (that rely on fixity) to performance (which is fluid).50 In a similar vein though a different context, Davenport and Prusak point the same way: "Firms," they argue, "need to shift their attention from documents to discussion."51 Firms, as Davenport and Prusak are well aware, should only Page 199 shift some of their attention in this direction.

Road to Nowhere: What Silicon Valley Gets Wrong About the Future of Transportation by Paris Marx

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Airbnb, An Inconvenient Truth, autonomous vehicles, back-to-the-land, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bike sharing, Californian Ideology, car-free, carbon credits, carbon footprint, cashless society, clean tech, cloud computing, colonial exploitation, computer vision, congestion pricing, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, DARPA: Urban Challenge, David Graeber, deep learning, degrowth, deindustrialization, deskilling, Didi Chuxing, digital map, digital rights, Donald Shoup, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Elaine Herzberg, Elon Musk, energy transition, Evgeny Morozov, Extinction Rebellion, extractivism, Fairchild Semiconductor, Ford Model T, frictionless, future of work, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, George Gilder, gig economy, gigafactory, global pandemic, global supply chain, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, green new deal, Greyball, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, independent contractor, Induced demand, intermodal, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, jitney, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, late capitalism, Leo Hollis, lockdown, low interest rates, Lyft, Marc Benioff, market fundamentalism, minimum viable product, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, Murray Bookchin, new economy, oil shock, packet switching, Pacto Ecosocial del Sur, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, price mechanism, private spaceflight, quantitative easing, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Nader, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, safety bicycle, Salesforce, School Strike for Climate, self-driving car, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, smart cities, social distancing, Southern State Parkway, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Stop de Kindermoord, streetcar suburb, tech billionaire, tech worker, techlash, technological determinism, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, TikTok, transit-oriented development, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Unsafe at Any Speed, urban planning, urban renewal, VTOL, walkable city, We are as Gods, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, WeWork, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, work culture , Yom Kippur War, young professional

Turner explained that through this venture, Brand positioned “the corporation as a site of revolutionary social change and interpersonal and information networks … as tools and emblems of that change,”23 a continuation of the message he promoted as the communalists reintegrated into society in the 1970s. The middle-class and even wealthy community that Whole Earth cultivated had already shunned the poor and people of color, and they were primed to buy into the right-wing ideologies of the 1980s and beyond. John Perry Barlow, co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) in 1990—a non-profit that took a libertarian approach to digital rights—believed that government had no authority over what happened on the internet. In 1996, he released an influential essay from Davos, Switzerland, called “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace,” in which he positioned governments as the enemy of the public, and especially of the communities and marketplaces being established on the internet, even though the government had funded the creation of the very network that make those interactions possible.

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., Congressional Record 135, May 18, 1989, S 9887. 21 Daniel Greene, The Promise of Access: Technology, Inequality, and the Political Economy of Hope, MIT Press, 2011. 22 Madeline Carr, US Power and the Internet in International Relations: The Irony of the Information Age, Palgrave Macmillan, 2016, p. 58 (author’s emphasis). 23 Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture, p. 194. 24 John Perry Barlow, “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace,” February 8, 1996, Eff.org. 25 Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture, p. 209. 26 Ibid., p. 222. 27 Ibid. 28 Mariana Mazzucato, The Entrepreneurial State: Debunking Public vs. Private Sector Myths, Anthem Press, 2013. 29 Carmen Hermosillo, “Pandora’s Vox: On Community in Cyberspace,” 1994, Gist.github.com. 30 Jennifer S.

The Sovereign Individual: How to Survive and Thrive During the Collapse of the Welfare State by James Dale Davidson, William Rees-Mogg

affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, bank run, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, borderless world, British Empire, California gold rush, classic study, clean water, colonial rule, Columbine, compound rate of return, creative destruction, Danny Hillis, debt deflation, ending welfare as we know it, epigenetics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, feminist movement, financial independence, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, George Gilder, Hernando de Soto, illegal immigration, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, information retrieval, Isaac Newton, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, market clearing, Martin Wolf, Menlo Park, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, new economy, New Urbanism, Norman Macrae, offshore financial centre, Parkinson's law, pattern recognition, phenotype, price mechanism, profit maximization, rent-seeking, reserve currency, road to serfdom, Ronald Coase, Sam Peltzman, school vouchers, seigniorage, Silicon Valley, spice trade, statistical model, telepresence, The Nature of the Firm, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, trade route, transaction costs, Turing machine, union organizing, very high income, Vilfredo Pareto

It will change the nature of sovereignties and transform economies, as the balance between protection and extortion swings more completely on the side of protection than it has ever done before. 143 "The Sovereign Individual" by James Dale Davidson & Lord William Rees-Mogg Simon & Schuster 1997 Chapter 7 TRANSCENDING LOCALITY The Emergence of the Cybereconomy "The real issue is control. The Internet is too widespread to be easily dominated by any single government. By creating a seamless global-economic zone, anti-sovereign and unregulatable, the Internet calls into question the very idea of a nationstate." JOHN PERRY BARLOW The Information Superhighway has become one of the more familiar metaphors of the early days of the digital age. It is remarkable not only for its pervasiveness, but also for the common misunderstanding it betrays about the cybereconomy. A highway, after all, is an industrial version of a footpath, a network for the physical transit of people and goods.

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Cyberspace transcends locality It involves nothing less than the instantaneous sharing of data everywhere and nowhere at once. The emerging information economy is based in the interconnections linking and relinking millions of users of millions of computers. Its essence lies in the new possibilities that arise from these connections. As John Perry Barlow put it, "What the Net offers is the promise of a new social space, global and anti-sovereign, within which anybody, anywhere can express to the rest of humanity whatever he or she believes without fear. There is in these new media a foreshadowing of the intellectual and economic liberty that might undo all the authoritarian powers on earth." 2 Cyberspace, like the imaginary realm of Homer's gods, is a realm apart from the familiar terrestrial world of farm and factory.

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James Adams, "Dawn of the Cyber Soldiers," The Sunday Times (London), October 15, 1995, pp.3-5. 47. Kelly, op. cit., p.19. 48. George Melloan, "Welfare State Reform Is Mostly Mythological," The Wall Street Journal. October 14, 1996, p. A19. Chapter 7. Transcending Locality: The Emergence of the Cybereconomy John Perry Barlow, "Thinking Locally, Acting Globally," Time, January 15, 1996, p.57. 2. Ibid. 3. M. C. Seymour, ed., Mandeville:' Travels (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968), p.122. 4. R. C. Johnson, "The Transportation of Vagrant Children from London to Virginia, 1618-1622," in H. S. Reinmuth, ed., Early Stuart Studies (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1970), pp. ~43-44, quoted in Jutte, op.

Your Computer Is on Fire by Thomas S. Mullaney, Benjamin Peters, Mar Hicks, Kavita Philip

"Susan Fowler" uber, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, affirmative action, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, AltaVista, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, An Inconvenient Truth, Asilomar, autonomous vehicles, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boeing 737 MAX, book value, British Empire, business cycle, business process, Californian Ideology, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, carbon footprint, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, collective bargaining, computer age, computer vision, connected car, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, dark matter, data science, Dennis Ritchie, deskilling, digital divide, digital map, don't be evil, Donald Davies, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, fake news, financial innovation, Ford Model T, fulfillment center, game design, gentrification, George Floyd, glass ceiling, global pandemic, global supply chain, Grace Hopper, hiring and firing, IBM and the Holocaust, industrial robot, informal economy, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Ken Thompson, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, Landlord’s Game, Lewis Mumford, low-wage service sector, M-Pesa, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, mobile money, moral panic, move fast and break things, Multics, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, new economy, Norbert Wiener, off-the-grid, old-boy network, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), packet switching, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, pink-collar, pneumatic tube, postindustrial economy, profit motive, public intellectual, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Kurzweil, Reflections on Trusting Trust, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, Salesforce, sentiment analysis, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, smart cities, Snapchat, speech recognition, SQL injection, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, tacit knowledge, tech worker, techlash, technoutopianism, telepresence, the built environment, the map is not the territory, Thomas L Friedman, TikTok, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, undersea cable, union organizing, vertical integration, warehouse robotics, WikiLeaks, wikimedia commons, women in the workforce, Y2K

In doing so, technical communities produce themselves as actors able to act “for the good of the internet,” in relation to political and economic interests.37 Infrastructures, Mathew reminds us, are relations, not things.38 Drawing on feminist informatics scholar Susan Leigh Star, and using his ethnography of network engineers to articulate how those relations are always embedded in human history and sociality, Mathew distinguishes his analysis from that encapsulated in John Perry Barlow’s 1996 A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace. Avowing that the internet does offer radical new social possibilities, he suggests that these are not because it transcends human politics but rather because it is “actively produced in the ongoing efforts and struggles of the social formations and technologies involved in the distributed governance of Internet infrastructure.”39 Mathew’s aim is “to uncover the internal logic of the production of the virtual space of the Internet, and the manner in which the production of virtual space opposes and reconciles itself with the production of the spaces of the nation state, and the spaces of capital.”40 His study begins with a methodological question as original as Stephenson’s.

…

The internet is constituted by entangled infrastructural and human narratives that cannot be understood via separate technological and humanistic histories. The historical forces that simultaneously shaped modern ontological assumptions about human difference and infrastructures of technological globalization are alive today. Racial, gendered, and national differences are embedded, in both familiar and surprising ways, in a space that John Perry Barlow once described as a utopia free from the tyranny of corporate and national sovereignty. With sympathy for Barlow’s passionate manifesto for cyberspace’s independence from the prejudices of the industrial era (“We are creating a world that all may enter without privilege or prejudice accorded by race, economic power, military force, or station of birth,” he announced in Davos in 1996),43 this chapter recognizes, also, that we cannot get there from here if we uncritically reuse the narratives and technologies thus far deployed by the internet’s visionaries, bureaucrats, builders, and regulators.

…

Archived at https://www.moma.org/collection/works/110263 and the Internet Archive, https://web.archive.org/web/*/opte.org. 42. Abigail De Kosnik, Benjamin De Kosnik, and Jingyi Li, “A Ratings System for Piracy: Quantifying and Mapping BitTorrent Activity for ‘The Walking Dead,’” unpublished manuscript, 2017. 43. John Perry Barlow, “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace,” Davos, Switzerland, February 8, 1996, Electronic Frontier Foundation, https://www.eff.org/cyberspace-independence. 44. The Wikimedia Foundation supports efforts to decolonize knowledge because, simply, their claim to house the sum of all knowledge in the world has been shown, by social movements from the Global South, to be woefully incomplete.

The Politics of Bitcoin: Software as Right-Wing Extremism by David Golumbia

3D printing, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alvin Toffler, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Burning Man, Californian Ideology, Cody Wilson, crony capitalism, cryptocurrency, currency peg, digital rights, distributed ledger, Dogecoin, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Extropian, fiat currency, Fractional reserve banking, George Gilder, Ian Bogost, jimmy wales, John Perry Barlow, litecoin, Marc Andreessen, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Mont Pelerin Society, new economy, obamacare, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, printed gun, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Satoshi Nakamoto, seigniorage, Silicon Valley, Singularitarianism, smart contracts, Stewart Brand, technoutopianism, The Chicago School, Travis Kalanick, Vitalik Buterin, WikiLeaks

This belief was articulated with particular force in the 1996 “Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace” written by the libertarian activist, Grateful Dead lyricist, and Electronic Frontier Foundation founder (EFF is a leading “digital rights” and technology industry advocacy organization) John Perry Barlow, which declared that “governments of the industrial world” are “not welcome” in and “have no sovereignty” over the digital realm. In practice, opposition to “government regulation of the internet” is best understood as a core (and in important ways vague) tenet, around which circulate greater and greater claims for the “freedom” created by digital technology.

Stealing Fire: How Silicon Valley, the Navy SEALs, and Maverick Scientists Are Revolutionizing the Way We Live and Work by Steven Kotler, Jamie Wheal

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, Abraham Maslow, Alexander Shulgin, Alvin Toffler, augmented reality, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, blockchain, Burning Man, Colonization of Mars, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, delayed gratification, disruptive innovation, driverless car, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Future Shock, Hacker News, high batting average, hive mind, How many piano tuners are there in Chicago?, hype cycle, Hyperloop, impulse control, independent contractor, informal economy, Jaron Lanier, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Larry Ellison, lateral thinking, Mason jar, Maui Hawaii, McMansion, means of production, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, microdosing, military-industrial complex, mirror neurons, music of the spheres, off-the-grid, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, PIHKAL and TIHKAL, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, Ray Kurzweil, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, science of happiness, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Steve Jobs, synthetic biology, TED Talk, time dilation, Tony Hsieh, urban planning, Virgin Galactic

“So embedded, so accepted has Burning Man become4 in parts of tech culture,” wrote journalist Vanessa Hua in the San Francisco Chronicle, “that the event alters work rhythms, shows up on resumes, is even a sanctioned form of professional development—all signs that the norm has adopted parts of the formerly deviant happening.” Over the last decade in particular, the festival has become a regular stop for those whose calendar might include Davos, TED, and a slew of other high-profile gatherings. In 2013, John Perry Barlow, a fellow at Harvard Law School5 and former lyricist for the Grateful Dead, casually tweeted from Burning Man: “Spent much of the afternoon in conversation with Larry Harvey, Mayor of Burning Man and Gen. Wesley Clark, who is here.” At one of the more infamous parties on the planet, countercultural royalty are hobnobbing with a former Supreme Commander of NATO turned U.S. presidential candidate.

…

You sink to your level of training: This quote is frequently attributed to an anonymous Navy SEAL (and often repeated by team members), but it most likely originated with the Greek poet Archilochus. “If you haven’t been [to Burning Man]’”: Nellie Bowles, “At HBO’s ‘Silicon Valley’ Premiere, Elon Musk Has Some Notes,” ReCode, April 3, 2014. 4. “So embedded, so accepted has Burning Man become”: Vanessa Hua, “Burning Man,” SFGate, August 20, 2000. 5. In 2013, John Perry Barlow, a fellow at Harvard Law School: @JPBarlow, Twitter. 6. Three years later, the actual president: “Just recently, a young person came up to me and said she was sick of politicians standing in the way of her dreams—as if we were actually going to let Malia go to Burning Man this year. Was not going to happen.

You Are Here: From the Compass to GPS, the History and Future of How We Find Ourselves by Hiawatha Bray

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Albert Einstein, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bitcoin, Boeing 747, British Empire, call centre, Charles Lindbergh, crowdsourcing, Dava Sobel, digital map, don't be evil, Easter island, Edmond Halley, Edward Snowden, Firefox, game design, Google Earth, GPS: selective availability, Hedy Lamarr / George Antheil, Isaac Newton, job automation, John Harrison: Longitude, John Perry Barlow, John Snow's cholera map, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, license plate recognition, lone genius, openstreetmap, polynesian navigation, popular electronics, RAND corporation, RFID, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Thales of Miletus, trade route, turn-by-turn navigation, uranium enrichment, urban planning, Zipcar

On the Internet nobody knows you are in Denver, or in Denmark, and even if people happened to know your location, it would not matter. Given a high-end computer and a high-speed broadband link, anyone anywhere could rival the mightiest global corporations and challenge the most despotic governments. Former Grateful Dead lyricist John Perry Barlow famously sang the song of the locationless Internet in his Utopian manifesto of 1996: “Ours is a world that is both everywhere and nowhere, but it is not where bodies live. . . . Your legal concepts of property, expression, identity, movement, and context do not apply to us. They are all based on matter, and there is no matter here.”1 Of course, the Internet is, ultimately, based in the physical world.

…

Catherine Shu, “Nav App Waze Says 36M Users Shared 900M Reports, While 65K Users Made 500M Map Edits,” TechCrunch, February 6, 2013, http://techcrunch.com/2013/02/06/nav-app-waze-says-36m-users-shared-900m-reports-while-65k-users-made-500m-map-edits/. 29. Jessica Guynn, “Google Acquisition Keeps Waze Out of Rivals’ Hands,” Los Angeles Times, June 12, 2013. Chapter 9 1. John Perry Barlow, “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace,” February 8, 1996, https://projects.eff.org/~barlow/Declaration-Final.html. 2. Thomas Lowenthal, “IP Address Can Now Pin Down Your Location to Within a Half Mile,” Ars Technica, April 22, 2011, http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2011/04/getting-warmer-an-ip-address-can-map-you-within-half-a-mile/. 3.

Reinventing the Bazaar: A Natural History of Markets by John McMillan

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Albert Einstein, Alvin Roth, Andrei Shleifer, Anton Chekhov, Asian financial crisis, classic study, congestion charging, corporate governance, corporate raider, crony capitalism, Dava Sobel, decentralized internet, Deng Xiaoping, Dutch auction, electricity market, experimental economics, experimental subject, fear of failure, first-price auction, frictionless, frictionless market, George Akerlof, George Gilder, global village, Great Leap Forward, Hacker News, Hernando de Soto, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, income inequality, income per capita, independent contractor, informal economy, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, job-hopping, John Harrison: Longitude, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, land reform, lone genius, manufacturing employment, market clearing, market design, market friction, market microstructure, means of production, Network effects, new economy, offshore financial centre, ought to be enough for anybody, pez dispenser, pre–internet, price mechanism, profit maximization, profit motive, proxy bid, purchasing power parity, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, sealed-bid auction, search costs, second-price auction, Silicon Valley, spectrum auction, Stewart Brand, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, transaction costs, War on Poverty, world market for maybe five computers, Xiaogang Anhui farmers, yield management

Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the world wide web (which he did not patent), has called for software developers to fight the patent system. He and other computer engineers believe software should be nonproprietary, so people could give it to each other and build on each other’s work, as indeed happened in the early days of computers. John Perry Barlow, founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a group fighting against intellectual property in cyberspace, said, “Copyright is not about creation, which will happen anyway: it is about distribution.” This is the key question: if software were free, would creation happen anyway? Some programs are written with no expectation of a patent.

…

“I think it’s okay,” said Jerry Garcia, the band’s leader, in 1975. “If people like it they can certainly keep doing it. I don’t have any desire to control people as to what they’re doing and what they have.” Despite the bootlegs—or because of them—the Grateful Dead earned more from their concert tours than most other rock bands. John Perry Barlow, who was a lyricist for the Dead before he became an internet activist, said permitting the copying “was the smartest thing we could have done. We raised the sales of our records considerably because of it.”8 The court heard expert testimony on Napster’s effect on compact disc sales. On Napster’s side were consumer surveys suggesting that Napster actually promoted purchases.

Consent of the Networked: The Worldwide Struggle for Internet Freedom by Rebecca MacKinnon

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Berlin Wall, blood diamond, business cycle, business intelligence, Cass Sunstein, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, Citizen Lab, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, corporate social responsibility, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, digital Maoism, don't be evil, Eben Moglen, Evgeny Morozov, Filter Bubble, Firefox, future of journalism, Global Witness, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Joi Ito, Julian Assange, Mark Zuckerberg, Mikhail Gorbachev, MITM: man-in-the-middle, national security letter, online collectivism, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Parag Khanna, pre–internet, race to the bottom, real-name policy, Richard Stallman, Ronald Reagan, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Steve Crocker, Steven Levy, Tactical Technology Collective, technological determinism, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler

Citizens’groups in various parts of the world will use the La Rue report as a powerful tool in pushing for more reasonable human rights and democratic approaches to Internet regulation. CIVIL SOCIETY PUSHES BACK On the eve of the May 2011 e-G8 meeting in Paris, former Grateful Dead lyricist and Electronic Frontier Foundation cofounder John Perry Barlow sent out a tweet quoting Sarkozy: “the Internet is a new frontier, a territory to conquer.” Then he added, “And I am in Paris to stop him.” “For the first time in human history, it is possible to convey to every human being the right to know . . . and the right to express him or herself,” Barlow later declared from the stage.

…

These extraordinary summer hack-fests are complemented by yearly winter conferences the CCC website describes as a “diverse audience of thousands of hackers, scientists, artists, and utopians from all around the world.” It is at such events that many of the new tools and techniques of digital resistance are first tested and deployed. UTOPIANISM VERSUS REALITY In 1996, John Perry Barlow famously wrote a manifesto titled “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace.” It began, “Governments 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.

The Pirate's Dilemma by Matt Mason

Albert Einstein, augmented reality, barriers to entry, blood diamond, citizen journalism, creative destruction, digital divide, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, East Village, Firefox, Free Software Foundation, future of work, glass ceiling, global village, Hacker Ethic, haute couture, Howard Rheingold, Internet of things, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, jimmy wales, job satisfaction, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Lao Tzu, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, Naomi Klein, new economy, New Urbanism, patent troll, peer-to-peer, prisoner's dilemma, public intellectual, RAND corporation, RFID, Richard Florida, Richard Stallman, SETI@home, side hustle, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, the long tail, Tim Cook: Apple, urban sprawl, Whole Earth Catalog

Are pirates here to scupper us, or save us? Are they a threat to be battled, or innovators we should compete with and learn from? To compete or not to compete—that is the question—perhaps the most important economic and cultural question of the twenty-first century. A man at the intersection between youth culture and innovation named John Perry Barlow, the cofounder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and former lyricist for the Grateful Dead, summarized the problem in 2003: Throughout the time I’ve been groping around cyberspace, an immense, unsolved conundrum has remained at the root of nearly every legal, ethical, governmental, and social vexation to be found in the Virtual World.

…

Because she is next to me, every day is a little better than the one before. NOTES This original composition contains samples and elements from the following original compositions: Page v Dr. Dre quote from the album Straight Outta Compton by N.W.A. (Ruthless/Priority Records, 1988). INTRO Enter the Lollipop Page 4 John Perry Barlow, “The Economy of Ideas,” Wired no. 2.03 (March 1994). www.wired.com/wired/archive/2.03/economy.ideas.html. Page 5 E. F. Schumacher, Small Is Beautiful (Point Roberts, WA: Hartley & Marks Publishers, 1999), p. 33. Page 6 “Marc Ecko,” interview by David Gensler, Royal Magazine 2, no. 9 (Winter 2006). http://www.theroyalmagazine.com.

#Republic: Divided Democracy in the Age of Social Media by Cass R. Sunstein

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alvin Toffler, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, digital divide, Donald Trump, drone strike, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, Filter Bubble, friendly fire, global village, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, Jane Jacobs, John Perry Barlow, loss aversion, Mark Zuckerberg, obamacare, Oklahoma City bombing, prediction markets, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, stem cell, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, Twitter Arab Spring, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler

Shouldn’t government simply leave the scene? Shouldn’t it eliminate regulation altogether? The same argument is being made about the Internet, even more forcefully, with the suggestion that it should be taken as a kind of government-free zone. In 1996, free speech activist (and former Grateful Dead lyricist) John Perry Barlow produced an influential “Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace,” urging, among other things, “Governments of the Industrial World . . . I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather. . . . You have no moral right to rule us nor do you possess any methods of enforcement we have true reason to fear.”1 That sounds like 1960s’ stuff, a kind of My Generation manifesto, opposing the we-who-gather to those of the past.

…

Hirschmann, The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism before Its Triumph (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1967). 13.See Jon Elster, Sour Grapes: Studies in the Subversion of Rationality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). 14.Verisign, The Domain Name Industry Brief 13, no. 1 (2016), http://www.verisign.com/assets/domain-name-report-april2016.pdf (accessed September 8, 2016). 15.For a good discussion, see Robert H. Frank, Luxury Fever: Weighing the Cost of Excess (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998). 16.See ibid. 17.See ibid. 7. WHAT’S REGULATION? A PLEA 1.John Perry Barlow, “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace,” Electronic Frontier Foundation, February 8, 1996, http://homes.eff.org/~barlow/Declaration-Final.html (accessed July 31, 2016). 2.Richard Posner, Catastrophe: Risk and Response (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 85. 3.See Internet Security Threat Report 21 (2016), https://www.symantec.com/content/dam/symantec/docs/reports/istr-21-2016-en.pdf (accessed September 8, 2016). 4.Elinor Ostrom, Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Robert C.

Is the Internet Changing the Way You Think?: The Net's Impact on Our Minds and Future by John Brockman

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Asperger Syndrome, availability heuristic, Benoit Mandelbrot, biofilm, Black Swan, bread and circuses, British Empire, conceptual framework, corporate governance, Danny Hillis, disinformation, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Emanuel Derman, epigenetics, Evgeny Morozov, financial engineering, Flynn Effect, Frank Gehry, Future Shock, Google Earth, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, index card, information retrieval, Internet Archive, invention of writing, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Large Hadron Collider, lifelogging, lone genius, loss aversion, mandelbrot fractal, Marc Andreessen, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Neal Stephenson, New Journalism, Nicholas Carr, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), out of africa, Paul Samuelson, peer-to-peer, pneumatic tube, Ponzi scheme, power law, pre–internet, Project Xanadu, Richard Feynman, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, satellite internet, Schrödinger's Cat, search costs, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, SETI@home, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, smart grid, social distancing, social graph, social software, social web, Stephen Hawking, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, telepresence, the medium is the message, the scientific method, the strength of weak ties, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, trade route, upwardly mobile, Vernor Vinge, Whole Earth Catalog, X Prize, Yochai Benkler

People were popping “smart” drugs (which didn’t do anything), Timothy Leary declared virtual reality the next psychedelic (which never panned out), Todd Rundgren warned of a coming overabundance of creative work without a parallel rise in great ideas (which is now reflected in laments about the rise of the amateur). It was still the old underground, running the new emerging culture. This new culture was driven by thought rather than art, though. That’s also where I met Cliff Figallo, who ran a virtual community called the WELL. He introduced me to John Perry Barlow, who had just established the Electronic Frontier Foundation. The name said it all: There was a new frontier. It would still take me a few more years to grasp this. One stifling evening in a rented apartment in downtown Dakar, my photographer and I disassembled a phone line and a modem to circumvent incompatible jacks and get our laptop to dial up some node in Paris.

…

Over the next decade and a half, I joined the camp of what I have since come to think of as Internet utopians. The Net seemed to offer this shining city on a hill, free from the grit and foulness of the meat world. Ideologically, this was a torch carried by Wired magazine, and the ideal probably reached its zenith in John Perry Barlow’s 1996 essay, “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace.” Silly me. I should have known better. It would all be spelled out clearly in John Brunner’s The Shockwave Rider, William Gibson’s Neuromancer, Neal Stephenson’s Snowcrash, Vernor Vinge’s True Names, and even less-well-read classics such as John Barnes’s The Mother of Storms.

Valley of Genius: The Uncensored History of Silicon Valley (As Told by the Hackers, Founders, and Freaks Who Made It Boom) by Adam Fisher

adjacent possible, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, An Inconvenient Truth, Andy Rubin, AOL-Time Warner, Apple II, Apple Newton, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Bill Atkinson, Bob Noyce, Brownian motion, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, Byte Shop, circular economy, cognitive dissonance, Colossal Cave Adventure, Computer Lib, disintermediation, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, dual-use technology, Dynabook, Elon Musk, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake it until you make it, fake news, frictionless, General Magic , glass ceiling, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker Ethic, Henry Singleton, Howard Rheingold, HyperCard, hypertext link, index card, informal economy, information retrieval, Ivan Sutherland, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Rulifson, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Jony Ive, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, life extension, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Maui Hawaii, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, Mondo 2000, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, nuclear winter, off-the-grid, PageRank, Paul Buchheit, paypal mafia, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, pets.com, pez dispenser, popular electronics, quantum entanglement, random walk, reality distortion field, risk tolerance, Robert Metcalfe, rolodex, Salesforce, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skeuomorphism, skunkworks, Skype, Snow Crash, social graph, social web, South of Market, San Francisco, Startup school, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Susan Wojcicki, synthetic biology, Ted Nelson, telerobotics, The future is already here, The Hackers Conference, the long tail, the new new thing, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, tulip mania, V2 rocket, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, Y Combinator

Kristen Spence: For those of us who were superyoung, it was just this cool thing happening. But Louis, Kevin, and John Plunkett had the long view. They understood how much things were changing. Amy Critchett: Louis was magnificent. His presence, force, and passion—that’s what made Wired happen. John Perry Barlow: Jane had the real juice. She got people really excited. There were a lot of people that gave them meetings because of her. She had a lot to do with creating the energy in the magazine and, to a fairly strong extent, its attitude as well. Louis Rossetto: Battelle was the most focused, hardest-working manager I’ve ever met.

…

And Kevin, who is a genius at this stuff, said, “Well, why don’t you just have it around the clock for twenty-four hours?” Kevin Kelly: We ran it from noon Saturday to noon Sunday. We sold tickets on The Well; we announced it in the magazine. We tried to have as many interesting people come as well. So Bruce Sterling was there, William Gibson, Tim Leary, Robin Williams, Jaron Lanier was there, John Perry Barlow. And of course all the VR people. And I thought the interesting thing would be in the middle of the night. People were tired and it was kind of crazy and dreamy. That was part of the happening aspect of it. R. U. Sirius: There were all these rooms with all this tech stuff being presented. Everybody had their VR stuff there.

…

Jim Barksdale was the first CEO of Netscape. He was recruited by Jim Clark, who put up the money and gathered the talent, but it was Barksdale who took Netscape public in 1995 and then kept the company alive while enduring constant attack from Microsoft, until Netscape’s eventual sale to AOL in 1999. John Perry Barlow wears many hats: rancher, activist, writer, lyricist. But if you ask him, he’ll tell you that he’s really a homesteader—in cyberspace. He was probably the best and certainly one of the most prolific writers on The Well, Stewart Brand’s early experiment in social media. In the nineties he was instrumental in founding the Electronic Frontier Foundation and still serves on the board of directors.

Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars From 4Chan and Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-Right by Angela Nagle

4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, affirmative action, anti-communist, battle of ideas, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, capitalist realism, citizen journalism, crony capitalism, death of newspapers, DIY culture, Donald Trump, Evgeny Morozov, feminist movement, Gabriella Coleman, game design, Hacker Ethic, Herbert Marcuse, hive mind, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, lolcat, mass immigration, moral panic, Nelson Mandela, Norman Mailer, Occupy movement, Oklahoma City bombing, open borders, Overton Window, post-industrial society, pre–internet, Ronald Reagan, sexual politics, Silicon Valley, Social Justice Warrior, Steve Bannon, The Wisdom of Crowds, WikiLeaks

Hakim Bey’s idea of the temporary autonomous zone was based on what he called ‘pirate utopias’ and he argued that the attempt to form a permanent culture or politics inevitably deteriorates into a structured system that stifles individual creativity. His language and ideas influenced anarchism and later, online cultures that advocated illegal downloading, anonymity, hacking and experiments like bitcoin. Echoes of John Perry Barlow’s manifesto ‘A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace’ can be seen in this earlier period of Anon culture and in analyses that reflect a more radical horizontalist politics, like Gabriella Coleman’s work. Barlow was one of the founders of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, anarchist hackers and defenders of an Internet free of state intervention, capitalist control and monopolizing of the online world.

Smarter Than You Think: How Technology Is Changing Our Minds for the Better by Clive Thompson

4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Andy Carvin, augmented reality, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Benjamin Mako Hill, butterfly effect, citizen journalism, Claude Shannon: information theory, compensation consultant, conceptual framework, context collapse, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, Deng Xiaoping, digital rights, discovery of penicillin, disruptive innovation, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, drone strike, Edward Glaeser, Edward Thorp, en.wikipedia.org, Evgeny Morozov, experimental subject, Filter Bubble, folksonomy, Freestyle chess, Galaxy Zoo, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Gunnar Myrdal, guns versus butter model, Henri Poincaré, hindsight bias, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, Ian Bogost, information retrieval, iterative process, James Bridle, jimmy wales, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, knowledge worker, language acquisition, lifelogging, lolcat, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, Netflix Prize, Nicholas Carr, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, patent troll, pattern recognition, pre–internet, public intellectual, Richard Feynman, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, Socratic dialogue, spaced repetition, superconnector, telepresence, telepresence robot, The future is already here, The Nature of the Firm, the scientific method, the strength of weak ties, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, transaction costs, Twitter Arab Spring, Two Sigma, Vannevar Bush, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WikiLeaks, X Prize, éminence grise

Though the U.S. government loves to talk about the free flow of information, when the Web site Wikileaks released internal diplomatic documents and footage of the military killing civilians, politicians and pundits fulminated so ferociously that major U.S. firms like Amazon and Paypal cut off Wikileaks, probably worried about being on the wrong side of a political fight. In 1996, writer and electronic activist John Perry Barlow proclaimed “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace.” Addressing old-school governments—“you weary giants of flesh and steel”—he proclaimed, “You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.” As it turns out, nothing of the sort was true. So is there any way to conduct civic speech in the corporate digital sphere without running afoul of corporate rules or putting activists in danger?

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the FBI violated the law thousands of times: “Patterns of Misconduct: FBI Intelligence Violations from 2001–2008,” Electronic Frontier Foundation, February 23, 2011, accessed March 26, 2013, www.eff.org/wp/patterns-misconduct-fbi-intelligence-violations. Amazon and Paypal cut off Wikileaks: Rebecca MacKinnon, “WikiLeaks, Amazon and the New Threat to Internet Speech,” CNN, December 3, 2010, accessed March 26, 2013, www.cnn.com/2010/OPINION/12/02/mackinnon.wikileaks.amazon/. “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace”: John Perry Barlow, “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace,” February 8, 1996, accessed March 26, 2013, projects.eff.org/~barlow/Declaration-Final.html. The free, open-source Tor: The Tor Project is online here: www.torproject.org/ (ac-cessed March 26, 2013); other modes of encrypted communications are detailed in “Learn to Encrypt Your Internet Communications,” Electronic Frontier Foundation, accessed March 26, 2013, ssd.eff.org/wire/protect/encrypt.

The Fifth Domain: Defending Our Country, Our Companies, and Ourselves in the Age of Cyber Threats by Richard A. Clarke, Robert K. Knake

"World Economic Forum" Davos, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air gap, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Amazon Web Services, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Black Swan, blockchain, Boeing 737 MAX, borderless world, Boston Dynamics, business cycle, business intelligence, call centre, Cass Sunstein, cloud computing, cognitive bias, commoditize, computer vision, corporate governance, cryptocurrency, data acquisition, data science, deep learning, DevOps, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Exxon Valdez, false flag, geopolitical risk, global village, immigration reform, information security, Infrastructure as a Service, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kubernetes, machine readable, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Metcalfe’s law, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Morris worm, move fast and break things, Network effects, open borders, platform as a service, Ponzi scheme, quantum cryptography, ransomware, Richard Thaler, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, Schrödinger's Cat, self-driving car, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, Snapchat, software as a service, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, technoutopianism, The future is already here, Tim Cook: Apple, undersea cable, unit 8200, WikiLeaks, Y2K, zero day

As the internet has gone from being the place you go to visit bulletin boards on esoteric topics to undergirding all of modern existence, the early vision for cyberspace as a domain beyond the reach of the state now seems hopelessly naïve. The internet pioneer John Perry Barlow is often held up as the embodiment of this “techno-utopian” vision for the internet. The founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), Barlow is a fascinating character. Steven Levy described him as a “cowboy, poet, romantic, family man, philosopher, and ultimately, the bard of the digital revolution.” When he died in early 2018, Rolling Stone titled his obituary “John Perry Barlow, Grateful Dead Lyricist, Dead at 70.” Barlow wrote such classics as “Mexicali Blues” with band member Bob Weir.

Exponential: How Accelerating Technology Is Leaving Us Behind and What to Do About It by Azeem Azhar

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, 3D printing, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Ada Lovelace, additive manufacturing, air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, algorithmic management, algorithmic trading, Amazon Mechanical Turk, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Bletchley Park, Blitzscaling, Boeing 737 MAX, book value, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, carbon footprint, Chris Urmson, Citizen Lab, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, collective bargaining, computer age, computer vision, contact tracing, contact tracing app, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, deep learning, deglobalization, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Demis Hassabis, Diane Coyle, digital map, digital rights, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, drone strike, Elon Musk, emotional labour, energy security, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Firefox, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, future of work, Garrett Hardin, gender pay gap, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, gig economy, global macro, global pandemic, global supply chain, global value chain, global village, GPT-3, Hans Moravec, happiness index / gross national happiness, hiring and firing, hockey-stick growth, ImageNet competition, income inequality, independent contractor, industrial robot, intangible asset, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Perry Barlow, Just-in-time delivery, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, Law of Accelerating Returns, lockdown, low skilled workers, lump of labour, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, Mitch Kapor, Mustafa Suleyman, Network effects, new economy, NSO Group, Ocado, offshore financial centre, OpenAI, PalmPilot, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Peter Thiel, Planet Labs, price anchoring, RAND corporation, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, remote working, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Sam Altman, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, software as a service, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Stuxnet, subscription business, synthetic biology, tacit knowledge, TaskRabbit, tech worker, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Future of Employment, The Nature of the Firm, Thomas Malthus, TikTok, Tragedy of the Commons, Turing machine, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, uranium enrichment, vertical integration, warehouse automation, winner-take-all economy, workplace surveillance , Yom Kippur War

If the industrial age of nineteenth and twentieth centuries cemented the importance of the nation state, the Exponential Age is shifting much of that significance to great cities. The result is a tension over where decisions about many aspects of the daily lives of more than half of humanity should occur: at the level of the nation state, or closer to home, in the city. John Perry Barlow, the former lyricist of the Grateful Dead, was also an internet rights activist for the Electronic Frontier Foundation. At the World Economic Forum’s Davos summit in 1996 he issued a Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace: Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind.

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, National Defense University Press, 12 July 2016 <http://ndupress.ndu.edu/Media/News/News-Article-View/Article/834357/will-technological-convergence-reverse-globalization/> [accessed 6 September 2020]. 26 Nick Butler, ‘US Energy Independence Has Its Costs’, Financial Times, 2019 <https://www.ft.com/content/20870c24-0b86-11ea-b2d6-9bf4d1957a67> [accessed 10 May 2021]. 27 ‘Urban Population (per cent of Total Population)’, World Bank Data <https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.URB.TOTL.IN.ZS> [accessed 11 January 2021]. 28 Azeem Azhar, ‘Don’t Call Time on the Megacity’, Exponential View, 20 May 2020 <https://www.exponentialview.co/p/-dont-call-time-on-the-megacity> [accessed 13 January 2021]. 29 Genevieve Giuliano, Sanggyun Kang and Quan Yuan, ‘Agglomeration Economies and Evolving Urban Form’, The Annals of Regional Science, 63(3), 2019, pp. 377–398 <https://doi.org/10.1007/s00168-019-00957-4>. 30 Cheng Ting-Fang, ‘How a Small Taiwanese City Transformed the Global Chip Industry’, Nikkei Asia, 15 December 2020 <https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Technology/How-a-small-Taiwanese-city-transformed-the-global-chip-industry> [accessed 13 January 2021]. 31 Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (New York: Random House, 1961), p. 31. 32 West, Scale, pp. 281–88. 33 ‘Bright Lights, Big Cities’, The Economist, 4 February 2015 <https://www.economist.com/node/21642053> [accessed 20 March 2021]. 34 Jeff Desjardins, ‘By 2100 None of the World’s Biggest Cities Will Be in China, the US or Europe’, World Economic Forum, 20 July 2018 <https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/07/by-2100-none-of-the-worlds-biggest-cities-will-be-in-china-the-us-or-europe/> [accessed 20 March 2021]. 35 ‘Cities Worldwide Will Struggle, but Will Avoid a Mass Exodus’, The Economist, 17 November 2020 <https://www.economist.com/the-world-ahead/2020/11/17/cities-worldwide-will-struggle-but-will-avoid-a-mass-exodus> [accessed 20 March 2021]. 36 ‘COVID-19 and the Myth of Urban Flight’, Knowledge@Wharton, 1 December 2020 <https://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/covid-19-and-the-myth-of-urban-flight/> [accessed 13 January 2021]. 37 Samrat Sharma, ‘India’s Rural-Urban Divide: Village Worker Earns Less than Half of City Peer’, Financial Express, 12 December 2019 <https://www.financialexpress.com/economy/indias-rural-urban-divide-village-worker-earns-less-than-half-of-city-peer/1792245/> [accessed 18 March 2021]. 38 ‘Is There Really an Ever-Widening Rural-Urban Divide in Europe’, Euler Hermes Global, 17 July 2019 <https://www.eulerhermes.com/en_global/news-insights/economic-insights/Is-there-really-an-ever-widening-rural-urban-divide-in-Europe.html> [accessed 18 March 2021]. 39 Patrick Greenfield, ‘Uber Licence Withdrawal Disproportionate, Says Theresa May’, The Guardian, 28 September 2017 <http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/sep/28/uber-licence-withdrawal-disproportionate-says-theresa-may> [accessed 23 March 2021]. 40 ‘Why Cities and National Governments Clash over Migration’, Financial Times, 4 June 2019 <https://www.ft.com/content/319ec1f6-5d25-11e9-840c-530737425559>. 41 John Perry Barlow, ‘A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace’, January 1996 <https://www.eff.org/cyberspace-independence> [accessed 7 January 2020]. 42 Andrei Soldatov Borogan Irina, ‘How the 1991 Soviet Internet Helped Stop a Coup and Spread a Message of Freedom’, Slate, August 2016 <https://slate.com/technology/2016/08/the-1991-soviet-internet-helped-stop-a-coup-and-spread-a-message-of-freedom.html> [accessed 31 July 2020]. 43 Berhan Taye and Sage Cheung, ‘The State of Internet Shutdowns in 2018’, Access Now, 8 July 2019 <https://www.accessnow.org/the-state-of-internet-shutdowns-in-2018/> [accessed 19 July 2020]. 44 Claudia Biancotti, ‘India’s Ill-Advised Pursuit of Data Localization’, Pieterson Institute for International Economics, 9 December 2019 <https://www.piie.com/blogs/realtime-economic-issues-watch/indias-ill-advised-pursuit-data-localization> [accessed 20 March 2021]. 45 DLA Piper, Data Protection Laws of the World. 46 Alan Beattie, ‘Data Protectionism: The Growing Menace to Global Business’, Financial Times, 14 May 2018 <https://medium.com/financial-times/data-protectionism-the-growing-menace-to-global-business-f994da37e9e2> [accessed 26 March 2021]. 47 Ian Bremmer, ‘Why We Need a World Data Organization.

Snowden's Box: Trust in the Age of Surveillance by Jessica Bruder, Dale Maharidge

air gap, anti-communist, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Broken windows theory, Burning Man, Cambridge Analytica, cashless society, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, computer vision, crowdsourcing, deep learning, digital rights, disinformation, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, end-to-end encryption, Evgeny Morozov, Ferguson, Missouri, Filter Bubble, Firefox, information security, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Jessica Bruder, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Laura Poitras, license plate recognition, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, medical malpractice, messenger bag, Neil Armstrong, Nomadland, Occupy movement, off grid, off-the-grid, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, Robert Bork, Seymour Hersh, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Skype, social graph, Steven Levy, surveillance capitalism, tech bro, Tim Cook: Apple, web of trust, WikiLeaks

Before long, he’d completed the Freedom of the Press Foundation’s first website. One of the pages had short biographies of personnel — mostly board members, including Laura and Greenwald, along with other well-known civil liberties champions such as the Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg; John Perry Barlow, the former Grateful Dead lyricist who helped create EFF; and Xeni Jardin, a founder and editor of the blog Boing Boing. As the organization’s lone staff member, Micah appeared at the bottom of the page. Though possibly the least-known figure on that roster of boldfaced names, he stood out.

The Cosmopolites: The Coming of the Global Citizen by Atossa Araxia Abrahamian

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Albert Einstein, barriers to entry, bitcoin, blockchain, borderless world, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, colonial rule, corporate social responsibility, cryptocurrency, digital rights, Edward Snowden, Evgeny Morozov, high net worth, illegal immigration, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, offshore financial centre, open immigration, Patri Friedman, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Thiel, public intellectual, Satoshi Nakamoto, Skype, technoutopianism, Westphalian system, WikiLeaks

It’s not a coincidence that Ver and Saverin are big names in the tech sector, an industry that is increasingly set on turning all commerce into a convenient, personalized service and “disrupting” traditional enterprise to be faster, cheaper, easier. Given these priorities, why wouldn’t citizenship come next? Ver’s cultural milieu of “solutionists” has emerged among today’s most vocal and powerful proponents of a border-free world of global citizens. John Perry Barlow, a founder of the digital rights group Electronic Frontier Foundation and a lyricist for the Grateful Dead, warned governments of the world of their looming irrelevance in his Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, which was published online in 1996. “Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind,” Barlow typed from a computer in Davos, Switzerland.

Radical Technologies: The Design of Everyday Life by Adam Greenfield

3D printing, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, AlphaGo, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, bank run, barriers to entry, basic income, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, business intelligence, business process, Californian Ideology, call centre, cellular automata, centralized clearinghouse, centre right, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, circular economy, cloud computing, Cody Wilson, collective bargaining, combinatorial explosion, Computer Numeric Control, computer vision, Conway's Game of Life, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, deep learning, DeepMind, dematerialisation, digital map, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, driverless car, drone strike, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, facts on the ground, fiat currency, fulfillment center, gentrification, global supply chain, global village, Goodhart's law, Google Glasses, Herman Kahn, Ian Bogost, IBM and the Holocaust, industrial robot, informal economy, information retrieval, Internet of things, Jacob Silverman, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Hawkins, job automation, jobs below the API, John Conway, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, joint-stock company, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, late capitalism, Leo Hollis, license plate recognition, lifelogging, M-Pesa, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, megacity, megastructure, minimum viable product, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, natural language processing, Network effects, New Urbanism, Nick Bostrom, Occupy movement, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, PalmPilot, Pareto efficiency, pattern recognition, Pearl River Delta, performance metric, Peter Eisenman, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, Ponzi scheme, post scarcity, post-work, printed gun, proprietary trading, RAND corporation, recommendation engine, RFID, rolodex, Rutger Bregman, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, sharing economy, Shenzhen special economic zone , Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart contracts, social intelligence, sorting algorithm, special economic zone, speech recognition, stakhanovite, statistical model, stem cell, technoutopianism, Tesla Model S, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Future of Employment, Tony Fadell, transaction costs, Uber for X, undersea cable, universal basic income, urban planning, urban sprawl, vertical integration, Vitalik Buterin, warehouse robotics, When a measure becomes a target, Whole Earth Review, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce

AD=ADA295861. 13.Steve Mann, “ ‘Reflectionism’ and ‘Diffusionism’: New Tactics for Deconstructing the Video Surveillance Superhighway,” Leonardo, Volume 31, Number 2, April 1998: pp. 93–102. 14.Lisa Guernsey, “At Airport Gate, A Cyborg Unplugged,” New York Times, March 14, 2002. 15.John Perry Barlow, “Leaving the Physical World,” Conference on HyperNetworking, 1998, w2.eff.org/Misc/Publications/John_Perry_Barlow/HTML/leaving_the_physical_world.html. 16.Governors Highway Safety Association. “Spotlight on Highway Safety: Pedestrian Fatalities by State,” 2010, ghsa.org/html/publications/pdf/spotlights/spotlight_ped.pdf. Similarly, a recent University of Utah study found that the act of immersion in a conversation, rather than any physical aspect of use, is the primary distraction while driving and talking on the phone.

Cybersecurity: What Everyone Needs to Know by P. W. Singer, Allan Friedman

4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, air gap, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, blood diamond, borderless world, Brian Krebs, business continuity plan, Chelsea Manning, cloud computing, cognitive load, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, data acquisition, do-ocracy, Dr. Strangelove, drone strike, Edward Snowden, energy security, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fault tolerance, Free Software Foundation, global supply chain, Google Earth, information security, Internet of things, invention of the telegraph, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Khan Academy, M-Pesa, military-industrial complex, MITM: man-in-the-middle, mutually assured destruction, Network effects, packet switching, Peace of Westphalia, pre–internet, profit motive, RAND corporation, ransomware, RFC: Request For Comment, risk tolerance, rolodex, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart grid, SQL injection, Steve Jobs, Stuxnet, Twitter Arab Spring, uranium enrichment, vertical integration, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, web application, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler, zero day, zero-sum game

Some argue that the group is “all bark, no bite,” a new form of a “noisy political demonstration.” Others argue that such critique misses the point: a handful of anonymous computer hackers have garnered worldwide attention for their personal causes, simply by putting forward a new model for mobilization on a global scale. As Electronic Frontier Foundation cofounder John Perry Barlow described, it may well be the new “shot heard round the world—this is Lexington.” The Crimes of Tomorrow, Today: What Is Cybercrime? When we were kids, you could visit a strange, wonderful place known as a “library.” There you could check out an encyclopedia (for you youngsters, imagine a paper Wikipedia) entitled the World of Tomorrow.

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PROTECT WORLD WIDE GOVERNANCE FOR THE WORLD WIDE WEB: WHAT IS THE ROLE OF INTERNATIONAL INSTITUTIONS? “public order or morals” International Telecommunication Union, “Plenipotentiary Conferences,” http://www.itu.int/en/history/Pages/PlenipotentiaryConferences.aspx?conf=1&dms=S0201000001, accessed January 14, 2013. “Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace” John Perry Barlow, “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace,” Electronic Frontier Foundation, https://projects.eff.org/~barlow/Declaration-Final.html, accessed January 14, 2013. “free” part of cyberspace Robert Axelrod, e-mail message to the authors, September 5, 2011. “Nazi memorabilia” Internet Governance Project, “Threat Analysis of the WCIT Part 4: The ITU and Cybersecurity,” June 21, 2012, http://www.internetgovernance.org/2012/06/21/threat-analysis-of-the-wcit-4-cybersecurity/, accessed January 2013.

The Wires of War: Technology and the Global Struggle for Power by Jacob Helberg

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, active measures, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air gap, Airbnb, algorithmic management, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bike sharing, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, cable laying ship, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, cloud computing, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, crisis actor, data is the new oil, data science, decentralized internet, deep learning, deepfake, deglobalization, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, deplatforming, digital nomad, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, dual-use technology, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, end-to-end encryption, fail fast, fake news, Filter Bubble, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, geopolitical risk, glass ceiling, global pandemic, global supply chain, Google bus, Google Chrome, GPT-3, green new deal, information security, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, knowledge economy, Larry Ellison, lockdown, Loma Prieta earthquake, low earth orbit, low skilled workers, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Mohammed Bouazizi, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, one-China policy, open economy, OpenAI, Parler "social media", Peter Thiel, QAnon, QR code, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, reshoring, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Russian election interference, Salesforce, Sam Altman, satellite internet, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart grid, SoftBank, Solyndra, South China Sea, SpaceX Starlink, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, supply-chain attack, Susan Wojcicki, tech worker, techlash, technoutopianism, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, TSMC, Twitter Arab Spring, uber lyft, undersea cable, Unsafe at Any Speed, Valery Gerasimov, vertical integration, Wargames Reagan, Westphalian system, white picket fence, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

In a survey by the Center for a New American Security, nearly 80 percent of top Silicon Valley executives considered the relationship between Silicon Valley and the Pentagon to be “poor” or “very poor.”40 The survey came out just a month after Beijing implemented its National Intelligence Law, the one requiring “any organization or citizen” to “assist and cooperate with the state intelligence work.” The Chinese government was drawing closer to its tech companies at the very moment that relationships in the United States were falling apart. The Marine Serves; The CEO Walks In 1996, John Perry Barlow, an Internet activist and onetime Grateful Dead lyricist, penned a Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace. “Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind,” Barlow wrote. “On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone.

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Now it’s preparing to clash with Big Tech,” Washington Post, July 27, 2020, https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/07/27/congress-tech-hearing/. 40 Loren DeJonge Schulman, Alexandra Sander, and Madeline Christian, “The Rocky Relationship Between Washington and Silicon Valley,” Copia, https://copia.is/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/COPIA-CNAS-Rocky-Relationship-Between-Washington-And-Silicon-Valley.pdf. 41 John Perry Barlow, “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace,” Electronic Frontier Foundation, February 8, 1996, https://www.eff.org/cyberspace-independence. 42 Amy Zegart and Kevin Childs, “The Divide Between Silicon Valley and Washington Is a National Security Threat,” The Atlantic, December 13, 2018, https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/12/growing-gulf-between-silicon-valley-and-washington/577963/. 43 Angus Loten, “Older IT Workers Left Out Despite Tech Talent Shortage,” Wall Street Journal, November 25, 2019, https://www.wsj.com/articles/older-it-workers-left-out-despite-tech-talent-shortage-11574683200?

The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom by Evgeny Morozov

"World Economic Forum" Davos, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Alvin Toffler, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, borderless world, Buckminster Fuller, Californian Ideology, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, computer age, conceptual framework, crowdsourcing, digital divide, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, don't be evil, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, global village, Google Earth, Herbert Marcuse, illegal immigration, invention of radio, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, lolcat, Marshall McLuhan, Mitch Kapor, Naomi Klein, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, off-the-grid, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, peer-to-peer, pirate software, pre–internet, Productivity paradox, public intellectual, RAND corporation, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Sinatra Doctrine, Skype, Slavoj Žižek, social graph, Steve Jobs, Streisand effect, technological determinism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Wisdom of Crowds, urban planning, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce

A month later, the Russian government announced that it, too, was considering giving every citizen a government-run email account, if only to make it easier to identify them when they deal with the increasingly electronic government. As already noted, Russian politicians have also been seriously considering creating a government-run search engine, to challenge Google’s rapid growth in the country; according to Russian media, $100 million has been disbursed for that purpose. John Perry Barlow, a cyber-utopian former lyricist of the Grateful Dead, who in 1996 wrote “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace,” a libertarian manifesto for the digital age, likes to point out that “in cyberspace, the First Amendment is a local ordinance.” This, however, may have been just a temporary equilibrium that could soon go away as other foreign governments discover that they would rather not have America own key parts of the infrastructure of the information society.

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J. “Super Wicked Problems and Climate Change: Restraining the Present to Liberate the Future.” Cornell Law Review 94, no. 5 (2009). Lessnoff, M. “The Political Philosophy of Karl Popper.” British Journal of Political Science 10, no. 1 (1980): 99-120. Morrison, A. H. “An Impossible Future: John Perry Barlow’s ‘Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace.’” New Media & Society 11, no. 1-2 (2009): 53. Norman, D. A. “Affordance, Conventions, and Design.” Interactions 6, no. 3 (1999): 38-43. Oliver, M. “The Problem with Affordance.” E-Learning and Digital Media 2, no. 4 (2005): 402-413. O’Loughlin, B.

Like, Comment, Subscribe: Inside YouTube's Chaotic Rise to World Domination by Mark Bergen

23andMe, 4chan, An Inconvenient Truth, Andy Rubin, Anne Wojcicki, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, book scanning, Burning Man, business logic, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, citizen journalism, cloud computing, Columbine, company town, computer vision, coronavirus, COVID-19, crisis actor, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, David Graeber, DeepMind, digital map, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, fake news, false flag, game design, gender pay gap, George Floyd, gig economy, global pandemic, Golden age of television, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Googley, growth hacking, Haight Ashbury, immigration reform, James Bridle, John Perry Barlow, Justin.tv, Kevin Roose, Khan Academy, Kinder Surprise, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, Minecraft, mirror neurons, moral panic, move fast and break things, non-fungible token, PalmPilot, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, QAnon, race to the bottom, recommendation engine, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, slashdot, Snapchat, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, speech recognition, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, surveillance capitalism, Susan Wojcicki, systems thinking, tech bro, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, TikTok, Walter Mischel, WikiLeaks, work culture

Few knew the DMCA like Fred von Lohmann. He had worked on one of its first prominent cases, defending Yahoo in a lawsuit over bootleg video game sales on its site. (Yahoo won.) Now he was a copyright gun for hire for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, or EFF, a prominent Silicon Valley civil liberties group. One of its founders, John Perry Barlow, an eccentric former lyricist for the Grateful Dead, railed against government and corporate attempts to rein in the web. In a 1994 essay Barlow predicted the internet’s coming ubiquity and laid out the philosophy that would define Silicon Valley: Once that has happened, all the goods of the Information Age—all of the expressions once contained in books or film strips or newsletters—will exist either as pure thought or something very much like thought: voltage conditions darting around the Net at the speed of light, in conditions that one might behold in effect, as glowing pixels or transmitted sounds, but never touch or claim to “own” in the old sense of the word.

…

After the NBC fracas, Schaffer’s dad joked that one son would make a video on Saturday and the other would delete it on Monday. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT had recently run an article: Brad Stone, “Video Napster?,” Newsweek, February 28, 2006, https://www.newsweek.com/video-napster-113493. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT a 1994 essay: John Perry Barlow, “The Economy of Ideas,” Wired, March 1, 1994, https://www.wired.com/1994/03/economy-ideas/. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT go viral and spread: Wong would write a college thesis on this subject. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT Wired would write: Joshua Davis, “The Secret World of Lonelygirl,” Wired, December 1, 2006, https://www.wired.com/2006/12/lonelygirl/.

The People vs Tech: How the Internet Is Killing Democracy (And How We Save It) by Jamie Bartlett

Ada Lovelace, Airbnb, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Andrew Keen, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Boris Johnson, Californian Ideology, Cambridge Analytica, central bank independence, Chelsea Manning, cloud computing, computer vision, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Filter Bubble, future of work, general purpose technology, gig economy, global village, Google bus, Hans Moravec, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, information retrieval, initial coin offering, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, John Gilmore, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, mittelstand, move fast and break things, Network effects, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, off grid, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, payday loans, Peter Thiel, post-truth, prediction markets, QR code, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Renaissance Technologies, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Mercer, Ross Ulbricht, Sam Altman, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, smart cities, smart contracts, smart meter, Snapchat, Stanford prison experiment, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, strong AI, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech worker, technological singularity, technoutopianism, Ted Kaczynski, TED Talk, the long tail, the medium is the message, the scientific method, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, too big to fail, ultimatum game, universal basic income, WikiLeaks, World Values Survey, Y Combinator, you are the product

The fundamental features of digital tech are at odds with this model: non-geographical, decentralised, data-driven, subject to network effects and exponential growth. Put simply: democracy wasn’t designed for this. That’s not really anyone’s fault, not even Mark Zuckerberg’s. I’m hardly alone in thinking this, by the way. Many early digital pioneers saw how what they called ‘cyberspace’ was mismatched with the physical world, too. John Perry Barlow’s oft-quoted 1996 Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace sums up this tension rather well: ‘Governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. You have neither solicited nor received ours. We did not invite you. You do not know us, nor do you know our world . . . Your legal concepts of property, expression, identity, movement and context do not apply to us.

Team Human by Douglas Rushkoff

1960s counterculture, Abraham Maslow, Adam Curtis, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Berlin Wall, big-box store, bitcoin, blockchain, Burning Man, carbon footprint, circular economy, clean water, clockwork universe, cloud computing, collective bargaining, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, corporate personhood, digital capitalism, disintermediation, Donald Trump, drone strike, European colonialism, fake news, Filter Bubble, full employment, future of work, game design, gamification, gig economy, Google bus, Gödel, Escher, Bach, hockey-stick growth, Internet of things, invention of the printing press, invention of writing, invisible hand, iterative process, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, knowledge economy, Larry Ellison, Lewis Mumford, life extension, lifelogging, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, mirror neurons, multilevel marketing, new economy, patient HM, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, planned obsolescence, power law, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, social intelligence, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, tech billionaire, technoutopianism, TED Talk, theory of mind, trade route, Travis Kalanick, Turing test, universal basic income, Vannevar Bush, We are as Gods, winner-take-all economy, zero-sum game

Study after study has shown that human beings cannot multitask Clifford Nass, “Cognitive Control in Media Multitaskers,” Pro­ceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 106, no. 27 (September 15, 2009). 39. The digital media environment expresses itself in the physical environment Richard Maxwell and Toby Miller, Greening the Media (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). 40. National governments were declared extinct John Perry Barlow, “Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace,” Wired, February 8, 1996. We are not advancing toward some new, totally inclusive global society, but retreating back to nativism Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994). Even 9/11 was a simultaneously experienced, global event Jean-Marie Colombani, “Nous Sommes Tous Américains,” Le Monde, September 12, 2001.

100 Things We've Lost to the Internet by Pamela Paul

2021 United States Capitol attack, 23andMe, Big Tech, coronavirus, COVID-19, emotional labour, financial independence, Google Earth, Jaron Lanier, John Perry Barlow, Kickstarter, lock screen, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Minecraft, off-the-grid, pre–internet, QR code, QWERTY keyboard, rolodex, Rubik’s Cube, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, TaskRabbit, telemarketer, TikTok, trickle-down economics, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Wall-E

It was supposed to allow people to show who they really were or, under the cloak of anonymity, to break free from who others expected them to be. The Internet was meant for strangers to exchange freely with one another and in good faith. In a speech at Davos in 1996, the late poet and cyberactivist John Perry Barlow said, “We are creating a world that all may enter without privilege or prejudice accorded by race, economic power, military force, or station of birth. We are creating a world where anyone, anywhere may express his or her beliefs, no matter how singular, without fear of being coerced into silence or conformity.”

Terms of Service: Social Media and the Price of Constant Connection by Jacob Silverman

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, 4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Aaron Swartz, Airbnb, airport security, Amazon Mechanical Turk, augmented reality, basic income, Big Tech, Brian Krebs, California gold rush, Californian Ideology, call centre, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, company town, context collapse, correlation does not imply causation, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, data science, deep learning, digital capitalism, disinformation, don't be evil, driverless car, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Evgeny Morozov, fake it until you make it, feminist movement, Filter Bubble, Firefox, Flash crash, game design, global village, Google Chrome, Google Glasses, Higgs boson, hive mind, Ian Bogost, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, information retrieval, Internet of things, Jacob Silverman, Jaron Lanier, jimmy wales, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, late capitalism, Laura Poitras, license plate recognition, life extension, lifelogging, lock screen, Lyft, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Rover, Marshall McLuhan, mass incarceration, meta-analysis, Minecraft, move fast and break things, national security letter, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, optical character recognition, payday loans, Peter Thiel, planned obsolescence, postindustrial economy, prediction markets, pre–internet, price discrimination, price stability, profit motive, quantitative hedge fund, race to the bottom, Ray Kurzweil, real-name policy, recommendation engine, rent control, rent stabilization, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Snapchat, social bookmarking, social graph, social intelligence, social web, sorting algorithm, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, telemarketer, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, Turing test, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, unpaid internship, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, yottabyte, you are the product, Zipcar

It’s a vision that’s been cultivated over decades and that has a very real effect on the types of products and digital environments these companies create, from the personal chauffeurs of Uber to the parlous world of online influence. Here users are guests of the benevolent technocratic elite, the digital overlords creating our brave new future and allowing us to visit and enjoy the view for the price of privacy and personal data. In an influential manifesto titled “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace,” John Perry Barlow, the Grateful Dead lyricist-turned-cyber-libertarian activist, told governments that they weren’t welcome in the new online world. This was 1996, the time of the Microsoft-Netscape browser war, the early years of the tech bubble, and the rise of search engines, which helped us unlock the plenitude of the World Wide Web.

…

Oct. 19, 2013. cnet.com/8301-1023_3-57608320-93/a-radical-dream-for-making-techno-utopias-a-reality. 250 “without having to deploy them”: Claire Cain Miller. “Larry Page Gets Personal at Google’s Conference.” Bits, a blog on NYTimes.com. May 15, 2013. bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/05/15/larry-page-gets-personal-at-googles-conference. 251 “a public construction project”: John Perry Barlow. “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace.” Electronic Frontier Foundation. Feb. 8, 1996. projects.eff.org/~barlow/Declaration-Final.html. 254 “at no cost”: ibid. 255 Amazon pulls 1984: Brad Stone. “Amazon Erases Orwell Books from Kindle.” New York Times. July 17, 2009. nytimes.com/2009/07/18/technology/companies/18amazon.html. 256 Zuckerberg’s color-blindness: Jose Antonio Vargas.

Dark Mirror: Edward Snowden and the Surveillance State by Barton Gellman

4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Aaron Swartz, active measures, air gap, Anton Chekhov, Big Tech, bitcoin, Cass Sunstein, Citizen Lab, cloud computing, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, data acquisition, data science, Debian, desegregation, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, evil maid attack, financial independence, Firefox, GnuPG, Google Hangouts, housing justice, informal economy, information security, Jacob Appelbaum, job automation, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Ken Thompson, Laura Poitras, MITM: man-in-the-middle, national security letter, off-the-grid, operational security, planetary scale, private military company, ransomware, Reflections on Trusting Trust, Robert Gordon, Robert Hanssen: Double agent, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, seminal paper, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, Skype, social graph, standardized shipping container, Steven Levy, TED Talk, telepresence, the long tail, undersea cable, Wayback Machine, web of trust, WikiLeaks, zero day, Zimmermann PGP

Many of the methods I commended to Poitras had their origins with the cypherpunks of the 1990s, a liberty-minded (and therefore leaderless) collective of visionaries and technologists. In the infancy of the internet, the cypherpunks set out to protect it from censorship, surveillance, and other forms of untoward state control. One of them, John Perry Barlow, a former Grateful Dead lyricist and cofounder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, wrote a declaration of independence, warning governments at large (“you weary giants of flesh and steel”) that “you are not welcome among us.” In “A Cypherpunk’s Manifesto,” Eric Hughes announced an action plan: “We know that someone has to write software to defend privacy, and since we can’t get privacy unless we all do, we’re going to write it.”

…

I also sent one of the occasional blog posts I wrote for Time online, “The Case of the Stolen Laptop: How to Encrypt, and Why,” Techland, August 6, 2010, http://ti.me/1Qjdu5f. the cypherpunks of the 1990s: See Steven Levy, Crypto: How the Code Rebels Beat the Government, Saving Privacy in the Digital Age (New York: Viking, 2001). See also Eric Hughes, “A Cypherpunk’s Manifesto” (1993), www.activism.net/cypherpunk/manifesto.html; and John Perry Barlow, “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace,” Electronic Frontier Foundation, February 8, 1996, www.eff.org/cyberspace-independence. invented “onion routing”: Among the seminal papers by Naval Research Laboratory employees was David Goldschlag, Michael Reed, and Paul Syverson, “Onion Routing for Anonymous and Private Internet Connections,” Communications of the Association for Computing Machinery, January 28, 1999, www.onion-router.net/Publications/CACM-1999.pdf.

If Then: How Simulmatics Corporation Invented the Future by Jill Lepore

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Alvin Toffler, anti-communist, Apollo 11, Buckminster Fuller, Cambridge Analytica, company town, computer age, coronavirus, cuban missile crisis, data science, desegregation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, Elon Musk, fake news, game design, George Gilder, Grace Hopper, Hacker Ethic, Howard Zinn, index card, information retrieval, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, job automation, John Perry Barlow, land reform, linear programming, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, Maui Hawaii, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, New Journalism, New Urbanism, Norbert Wiener, Norman Mailer, packet switching, Peter Thiel, profit motive, punch-card reader, RAND corporation, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, SimCity, smart cities, social distancing, South China Sea, Stewart Brand, technoutopianism, Ted Sorensen, Telecommunications Act of 1996, urban renewal, War on Poverty, white flight, Whole Earth Catalog

“The meaning of freedom, structures of self-government, definition of property, nature of competition, conditions for cooperation, sense of community and nature of progress will each be redefined for the Knowledge Age,” the new Magna Carta read, in lines that could have been written by Pool.57 Pool’s work equally informed the 1996 “Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace,” drafted by another leading counterculture figure, John Perry Barlow, a former lyricist for the Grateful Dead. “We are creating a world where anyone, anywhere may express his or her beliefs, no matter how singular, without fear of being coerced into silence or conformity,” Barlow wrote.58 And, most lastingly, Pool’s argument for treating the emerging Internet as a “technology of freedom” formed the underlying logic of the 1996 Telecommunications Act, under whose terms earlier campaigns to treat the Internet the way the federal government treated radio—as a regulated public utility—were abandoned.

…

., 33. Ibid., 183–84, 222–32. Stewart Brand, “We Owe It All to the Hippies,” Time, March 1, 1995. Esther Dyson, George Gilder, George Keyworth, and Alvin Toffler, Cyberspace and the American Dream: A Magna Carta for the Knowledge Age (Progress and Freedom Foundation, 1994). John Perry Barlow, “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace,” February 8, 1996. IP, Questionnaire, undated, Pool Papers, Box 59, Folder “Contact Nets Diary.” John McPhee, “Link with Local History Lost,” Alamogordo [NM] Daily News, April 10, 1998. Wendy McPhee, interview with the author, July 16, 2018.

America at the Crossroads: Democracy, Power, and the Neoconservative Legacy by Francis Fukuyama

affirmative action, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, cuban missile crisis, David Brooks, European colonialism, failed state, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, information security, Internet Archive, John Perry Barlow, Mikhail Gorbachev, Monroe Doctrine, mutually assured destruction, New Journalism, no-fly zone, oil-for-food scandal, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, transaction costs, uranium enrichment, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus

Many feel that these developments could have emerged only in a freewheeling, competitive capitalist order with minimal government interference in private markets. There is a distinctively American form of techno-libertarianism that translates traditional American antistatism into a modern high-tech setting, exemplified by John Perry Barlow and the Electronic Frontier Foundation that he helped found. 12 The view that the American information technology industry owed its success to the absence of government intervention is only partially correct. Most of the major American technological advances of the late twentieth century were stimulated by government encouragement and investment. 13 But there was enough truth in the techno-libertarian view to convince many Americans that their particular mix of market and state represented the wave of the future.

Company: A Short History of a Revolutionary Idea by John Micklethwait, Adrian Wooldridge

affirmative action, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Bonfire of the Vanities, book value, borderless world, business process, Carl Icahn, Charles Lindbergh, classic study, company town, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, credit crunch, crony capitalism, double entry bookkeeping, Etonian, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial engineering, Great Leap Forward, hiring and firing, Ida Tarbell, industrial cluster, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, John Perry Barlow, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, laissez-faire capitalism, manufacturing employment, market bubble, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, mittelstand, new economy, North Sea oil, pneumatic tube, race to the bottom, railway mania, Ronald Coase, scientific management, Silicon Valley, six sigma, South Sea Bubble, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strikebreaker, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, transaction costs, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, tulip mania, wage slave, William Shockley: the traitorous eight

It was no coincidence that the main corporate heroes of the period all hailed from a place famous for small, agile firms—the thin sliver of land between San Jose and San Francisco that had once been known as the Valley of Heart’s Delight. SILICON VALLEY In 1996, with the Internet revolution gathering pace, John Perry Barlow, a Grateful Dead songwriter and cyber guru, issued the following warning: “Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of the Mind. I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us.” Silicon Valley’s penchant for hyperbole can be grating.

Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires by Douglas Rushkoff

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Andrew Keen, AOL-Time Warner, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, behavioural economics, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, Biosphere 2, bitcoin, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, Burning Man, buy low sell high, Californian Ideology, carbon credits, carbon footprint, circular economy, clean water, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, CRISPR, data science, David Graeber, DeepMind, degrowth, Demis Hassabis, deplatforming, digital capitalism, digital map, disinformation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, European colonialism, Evgeny Morozov, Extinction Rebellion, Fairphone, fake news, Filter Bubble, game design, gamification, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, Google bus, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, Haight Ashbury, hockey-stick growth, Howard Rheingold, if you build it, they will come, impact investing, income inequality, independent contractor, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, job automation, John Nash: game theory, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, Just-in-time delivery, liberal capitalism, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, megaproject, meme stock, mental accounting, Michael Milken, microplastics / micro fibres, military-industrial complex, Minecraft, mirror neurons, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, New Urbanism, Norbert Wiener, Oculus Rift, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), operational security, Patri Friedman, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, Plato's cave, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, QAnon, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Sam Altman, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, SimCity, Singularitarianism, Skinner box, Snapchat, sovereign wealth fund, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, surveillance capitalism, tech billionaire, tech bro, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, the medium is the message, theory of mind, TikTok, Torches of Freedom, Tragedy of the Commons, universal basic income, urban renewal, warehouse robotics, We are as Gods, WeWork, Whole Earth Catalog, work culture , working poor

Chapter 2: Mergers and Acquisitions   25   Tech companies actively sought : Douglas Rushkoff, Cyberia: Life in the Trenches of Hyperspace (New York: HarperOne, 1994).   25   “new communalists” : Fred Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006).   26   Operation Sundevil : Bruce Sterling, The Hacker Crackdown: Law and Disorder on the Electronic Frontier (New York: Bantam, 1992).   26   “Governments of the Industrial World” : John Perry Barlow, “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace,” Electronic Frontier Foundation, 1996, https:// www .eff .org /cyberspace -independence.   26   fungus and bacteria : Qi Hui Sam, Matthew Wook Chang, and Louis Yi Ann Chai, “The Fungal Mycobiome and Its Interaction with Gut Bacteria in the Host,” International Journal of Molecular Sciences , February 4, 2017, https:// www .ncbi .nlm .nih .gov /pmc /articles /PMC5343866 /.   28   extolled the virtues of the deal : Saul Hansell, “America Online Agrees to Buy Time Warner for $165 Billion; Media Deal is Richest Merger,” New York Times , January 11, 2000, https:// www .nytimes .com /2000 /01 /11 /business /media -megadeal -overview -america -online -agrees -buy -time -warner -for -165 -billion .html.   28   the piece I wrote placed in the Guardian : Douglas Rushkoff, “Why Time Is Up for Warner,” Guardian , January 20, 2000, https:// www .theguardian .com /technology /2000 /jan /20 /onlinesupplement10.   29   People blamed : Seth Stevenson, “The Believer,” New York Magazine , July 6, 2007, https:// nymag .com /news /features /34454 /.   30   hired investment bank Salomon Smith Barney : Tim Arango, “How the AOL–Time Warner Merger Went So Wrong,” New York Times , January 10, 2010, https:// www .nytimes .com /2010 /01 /11 /business /media /11merger .html.   31   probably borrowed : Steven Levy, Facebook: The Inside Story (New York: Blue Rider Press, 2020).   32   stocks quadruple : Lisa Pham, “This Company Added the Word ‘Blockchain’ to Its Name and Saw Its Shares Surge 394%,” Bloomberg , October 27, 2017, https:// www .bloomberg .com /news /articles /2017 -10 -27 /what -s -in -a -name -u -k -stock -surges -394 -on -blockchain -rebrand.   33   “independent, host-led local organizations” : Dave Lee, “Airbnb Using ‘Independent’ Host Groups to Lobby Policymakers,” Financial Times , March 21, 2021, https:// www .ft .com /content /1afb3173 -444a -47fa -99ec -554779dde236.   33   Google was outspending : Shaban Hamza, “Google for the First Time Outspent Every Other Company to Influence Washington in 2017,” Washington Post , January 23, 2018, https:// www .washingtonpost .com /news /the -switch /wp /2018 /01 /23 /google -outspent -every -other -company -on -federal -lobbying -in -2017 /.   33   outspent by Facebook : Lauren Feiner, “Facebook Spent More on Lobbying than Any Other Big Tech Company in 2020,” CNBC , January 22, 2021, https:// www .cnbc .com /2021 /01 /22 /facebook -spent -more -on -lobbying -than -any -other -big -tech -company -in -2020 .html.   33   Numerous studies : Martin Gilens and Benjamin I.

You Are Not a Gadget by Jaron Lanier

1960s counterculture, Abraham Maslow, accounting loophole / creative accounting, additive manufacturing, Albert Einstein, Bear Stearns, call centre, cloud computing, commoditize, crowdsourcing, death of newspapers, different worldview, digital Maoism, Douglas Hofstadter, Extropian, follow your passion, General Magic , hive mind, Internet Archive, Jaron Lanier, jimmy wales, John Conway, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Long Term Capital Management, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, packet switching, PageRank, pattern recognition, Ponzi scheme, Project Xanadu, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Stallman, Savings and loan crisis, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, slashdot, social graph, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Stuart Kauffman, synthetic biology, technological determinism, Ted Nelson, telemarketer, telepresence, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, trickle-down economics, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, Whole Earth Catalog

Would they become trapped in it, unable to escape back to the physical world where the rest of us live? Some of the questions were silly, and others were prescient. How Politics Influences Information Technology I was part of a merry band of idealists back then. If you had dropped in on, say, me and John Perry Barlow, who would become a cofounder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, or Kevin Kelly, who would become the founding editor of Wired magazine, for lunch in the 1980s, these are the sorts of ideas we were bouncing around and arguing about. Ideals are important in the world of technology, but the mechanism by which ideals influence events is different than in other spheres of life.

Insanely Great: The Life and Times of Macintosh, the Computer That Changed Everything by Steven Levy

Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Bill Atkinson, computer age, Computer Lib, conceptual framework, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, General Magic , Howard Rheingold, HyperCard, information retrieval, information trail, Ivan Sutherland, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Marshall McLuhan, Mitch Kapor, Mother of all demos, Pepsi Challenge, Productivity paradox, QWERTY keyboard, reality distortion field, rolodex, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Ted Nelson, The Home Computer Revolution, the medium is the message, Vannevar Bush

In the age of computers, the best science fiction writers are no longer speculative prophets, but interpreters of a newly synthesized reality, constructed of mathematics and information. Thus it appears that instead of inventing cyberspace, Gibson identified it. It had been there, we now understand, for years. Cyberspace, says essayist and lyricist John Perry Barlow, is where conversations are conducted when two people talk on the telephone. But most often it is associated with a landscape of data. Or as Michael Benedikt, an architecture professor, described C-space, "The tablet become a page become a screen become a world, a virtual world. Its depths increase with every image and word or number, with every addition, every contribution, of fact or thought.

Silicon City: San Francisco in the Long Shadow of the Valley by Cary McClelland

affirmative action, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, Apple II, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Black Lives Matter, Burning Man, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, computer vision, creative destruction, driverless car, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, Fairchild Semiconductor, full employment, gamification, gentrification, gig economy, Golden Gate Park, Google bus, Google Glasses, high net worth, housing crisis, housing justice, income inequality, John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, Loma Prieta earthquake, Lyft, mass immigration, means of production, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, open immigration, PalmPilot, rent control, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, Social Justice Warrior, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, TaskRabbit, tech bro, tech worker, transcontinental railway, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, urban planning, vertical integration, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, young professional

“Sasha makes something new, we try it, we go to bed, we make love. In the morning, we have a big bowl of soup and talk about it.” But you go to Brazil, and an Indian in a jungle is having similar visions. Drinking ayahuasca is like plugging into the umbilical cord of the planet. Realms that we don’t know how to navigate until people experiment, try. John Perry Barlow. He was such a cowboy—so cool and fun—you couldn’t resist that. He founded the Electronic Frontier Foundation, with John Gilmore and Mitch Kapor, because he didn’t want the government to run away with this new technology. He thought technology should be free. He was never afraid of speaking the truth or confronting “givens.”

Owning the Earth: The Transforming History of Land Ownership by Andro Linklater

agricultural Revolution, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, Anton Chekhov, Ayatollah Khomeini, Bear Stearns, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, British Empire, business cycle, colonial rule, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, electricity market, facts on the ground, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, Google Earth, Great Leap Forward, income inequality, invisible hand, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, John Perry Barlow, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kibera, Kickstarter, land reform, land tenure, light touch regulation, market clearing, means of production, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, Mohammed Bouazizi, Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay, mortgage debt, Northern Rock, Peace of Westphalia, Pearl River Delta, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, quantitative easing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, refrigerator car, Right to Buy, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, spinning jenny, Suez canal 1869, The Chicago School, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, three-masted sailing ship, too big to fail, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, ultimatum game, wage slave, WikiLeaks, wikimedia commons, working poor

With TRIPS, the idea of private exclusive property that first appeared in relation to land in sixteenth-century England could be said to have conquered the world. However, in the very year that the TRIPS agreement dispersed this system around the globe, the central edifice of intellectual rights threatened to evaporate through the even faster expansion of digitized information across the World Wide Web. In a prescient article written in 1994, John Perry Barlow, Grateful Dead lyricist and cofounder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, warned of the impact of being able to express all information in binary form: “If our property can be infinitely reproduced and instantaneously distributed all over the planet without cost, without our knowledge, without its even leaving our possession, how can we protect it?”

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the Uruguay round of trade agreements: For the effect of TRIPS on communal and traditional medical knowledge, see “Native medicines—who should profit?,” New Scientist 181, issue 2436 (February 28, 2004), 15. In a prescient article: “The Economy of Ideas: A framework for patents and copyrights in the Digital Age” by John Perry Barlow. Wired, Mar. 1994. “cancerous” and “unAmerican”: Microsoft’s epithets are quoted in an interview with Linus Torvals in “Linux succeeded thanks to selfishness and trust,” by Leo Kelion, New York Times, June 13, 2012. “There is no enterprise”: Henry Dawes made his comment to the Senate in 1883.

The (Honest) Truth About Dishonesty: How We Lie to Everyone, Especially Ourselves by Dan Ariely

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Albert Einstein, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Broken windows theory, cashless society, clean water, cognitive dissonance, cognitive load, Credit Default Swap, Donald Trump, fake it until you make it, financial engineering, fudge factor, John Perry Barlow, new economy, operational security, Richard Feynman, Schrödinger's Cat, Shai Danziger, shareholder value, social contagion, Steve Jobs, Tragedy of the Commons, Walter Mischel

There’s one way to find out if a man is honest—ask him. If he says “yes,” he is a crook. —GROUCHO MARX My interest in cheating was first ignited in 2002, just a few months after the collapse of Enron. I was spending the week at some technology-related conference, and one night over drinks I got to meet John Perry Barlow. I knew John as the erstwhile lyricist for the Grateful Dead, but during our chat I discovered that he had also been working as a consultant for a few companies—including Enron. In case you weren’t paying attention in 2001, the basic story of the fall of the Wall Street darling went something like this: Through a series of creative accounting tricks—helped along by the blind eye of consultants, rating agencies, the company’s board, and the now-defunct accounting firm Arthur Andersen, Enron rose to great financial heights only to come crashing down when its actions could no longer be concealed.

Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism by Safiya Umoja Noble

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, affirmative action, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, Alvin Toffler, Black Lives Matter, borderless world, cloud computing, conceptual framework, critical race theory, crowdsourcing, data science, desegregation, digital divide, disinformation, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, fake news, Filter Bubble, Firefox, Future Shock, Gabriella Coleman, gamification, Google Earth, Google Glasses, housing crisis, illegal immigration, immigration reform, information retrieval, information security, Internet Archive, Jaron Lanier, John Perry Barlow, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, Naomi Klein, new economy, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, PageRank, performance metric, phenotype, profit motive, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Snapchat, the long tail, Tim Cook: Apple, union organizing, women in the workforce, work culture , yellow journalism

Challenging Cybertopias All of this leads to more discussion about ideologies that serve to stabilize and normalize the notion of commercial search, including the still-popular and ever-persistent dominant narratives about the neutrality and objectivity of the Internet itself—beyond Google and beyond utopian visions of computer software and hardware. The early cybertarian John Perry Barlow’s infamous “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace” argued in part, “We are creating a world that all may enter without privilege or prejudice accorded by race, economic power, military force, or station of birth. We are creating a world where anyone, anywhere may express his or her beliefs, no matter how singular, without fear of being coerced into silence or conformity.”93 Yet the web is not only an intangible space; it is also a physical space made of brick, mortar, metal trailers, electronics containing magnetic and optical media, and fiber infrastructure.

Age of the City: Why Our Future Will Be Won or Lost Together by Ian Goldin, Tom Lee-Devlin

15-minute city, 1960s counterculture, agricultural Revolution, Alvin Toffler, Anthropocene, anti-globalists, Berlin Wall, Bonfire of the Vanities, Brixton riot, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, charter city, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean water, cloud computing, congestion charging, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, data science, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, Edward Glaeser, Edward Jenner, Enrique Peñalosa, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, financial independence, future of work, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, germ theory of disease, global pandemic, global supply chain, global village, Haight Ashbury, Hernando de Soto, high-speed rail, household responsibility system, housing crisis, Howard Rheingold, income per capita, Induced demand, industrial robot, informal economy, invention of the printing press, invention of the wheel, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Perry Barlow, John Snow's cholera map, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labour mobility, Lewis Mumford, lockdown, Louis Pasteur, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, megacity, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, open borders, open economy, Pearl River Delta, race to the bottom, Ray Oldenburg, remote working, rent control, Republic of Letters, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, rising living standards, Salesforce, Shenzhen special economic zone , smart cities, smart meter, Snow Crash, social distancing, special economic zone, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, superstar cities, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Great Good Place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, trade route, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment, urban decay, urban planning, urban sprawl, Victor Gruen, white flight, working poor, working-age population, zero-sum game, zoonotic diseases

In 1993, the writer Howard Rheingold published The Virtual Community, in which he described with breathless enthusiasm the emergence of The WELL – short for Whole Earth ’Lectronic Link – a type of embryonic social network that allowed members to connect with one another over the internet and build shared interest groups. In 1996, journalist and cyber optimist John Perry Barlow published his Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, in which he described his vision for the internet as ‘a world that all may enter without privilege or prejudice accorded to race, economic power, military force, or station of birth … where anyone, anywhere may express his or her beliefs, no matter how singular, without fear of being coerced into silence or conformity’.1 The fact that key figures like Stewart Brand, who founded The WELL, were also central participants in the 1960s counterculture, with its egalitarian and universalist ethos, helps explain some of this utopian hyperbole.

Free Speech: Ten Principles for a Connected World by Timothy Garton Ash

"World Economic Forum" Davos, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Aaron Swartz, activist lawyer, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Andrew Keen, Apple II, Ayatollah Khomeini, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, British Empire, Cass Sunstein, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, Citizen Lab, Clapham omnibus, colonial rule, critical race theory, crowdsourcing, data science, David Attenborough, digital divide, digital rights, don't be evil, Donald Davies, Douglas Engelbart, dual-use technology, Edward Snowden, Etonian, European colonialism, eurozone crisis, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ferguson, Missouri, Filter Bubble, financial independence, Firefox, Galaxy Zoo, George Santayana, global village, Great Leap Forward, index card, Internet Archive, invention of movable type, invention of writing, Jaron Lanier, jimmy wales, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Laura Poitras, machine readable, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Mary Meeker, mass immigration, megacity, mutually assured destruction, national security letter, Nelson Mandela, Netflix Prize, Nicholas Carr, obamacare, Open Library, Parler "social media", Peace of Westphalia, Peter Thiel, power law, pre–internet, profit motive, public intellectual, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Ronald Reagan, semantic web, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Simon Singh, Snapchat, social graph, Stephen Fry, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Streisand effect, technological determinism, TED Talk, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tipper Gore, trolley problem, Turing test, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, WikiLeaks, World Values Survey, Yochai Benkler, Yom Kippur War, yottabyte

‘Cyberspace’ is a word coined by the science fiction writer William Gibson in a short story published in 1982 (‘Burning Chrome’) and subsequently used in his novel Neuromancer. In the 1990s, as science fiction seemed to be becoming fact, American cyberlibertarian hopes for a global newfoundland of freedom soared to giddy heights. John Perry Barlow, a passionate advocate for internet freedom and former lyricist of the rock band the Grateful Dead, produced in 1996 a Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, with obvious echoes of the 1776 Declaration of Independence. It even denounced ‘hostile and colonial measures’, as if King George III were about to dispatch his redcoats into cyberspace.

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The cyberlaw expert Tim Wu is credited with coining the term; see Wu 2003. Listen to his discussion of it on ‘Wu on His Phrase “Net Neutrality”’, Free Speech Debate, http://freespeechdebate.com/en/media/net-neutrality-by-the-man-who-coined-the-phrase/, and see the introduction on his website at http://perma.cc/4Z5P-RP4C 55. dated 8 February 1996; John Perry Barlow, ‘A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace’, http://perma.cc/V8VS-XHZD 56. full detail in Mueller 2004 and Mueller 2012 57. a useful account of the history is given on Wikipedia: http://perma.cc/Q36Q-366E 58. see several contributions to Levmore et al., eds. 2010 and Sunstein 2009, 83 59.

Lab Rats: How Silicon Valley Made Work Miserable for the Rest of Us by Dan Lyons

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, antiwork, Apple II, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Blue Ocean Strategy, business process, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Clayton Christensen, clean water, collective bargaining, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, data science, David Heinemeier Hansson, digital rights, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fake news, full employment, future of work, gig economy, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Hacker News, hiring and firing, holacracy, housing crisis, impact investing, income inequality, informal economy, initial coin offering, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, job-hopping, John Gruber, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kanban, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, Lean Startup, loose coupling, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, Menlo Park, Milgram experiment, minimum viable product, Mitch Kapor, move fast and break things, new economy, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Parker Conrad, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, precariat, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, public intellectual, RAND corporation, remote working, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Ruby on Rails, Sam Altman, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, scientific management, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, Skinner box, Skype, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, SoftBank, software is eating the world, Stanford prison experiment, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, stock buybacks, super pumped, TaskRabbit, tech bro, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, TED Talk, telemarketer, Tesla Model S, Thomas Davenport, Tony Hsieh, Toyota Production System, traveling salesman, Travis Kalanick, tulip mania, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, web application, WeWork, Whole Earth Catalog, work culture , workplace surveillance , Y Combinator, young professional, Zenefits

Jobs was an LSD-taking, commune-dwelling hippie who often went barefoot and who was influenced by Stewart Brand, a proponent of psychedelic drugs who hung out with Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters. Brand created the Whole Earth Catalog and co-founded the WELL, one of the first online communities. Its members included John Perry Barlow, who wrote lyrics for the Grateful Dead and co-founded the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an Internet civil liberties advocacy organization. Counterculture values—freedom, personal liberation, civil rights, respect for the individual—shaped the culture of Silicon Valley. My first encounter with the old version of Silicon Valley came in the late 1980s, when I visited a software company in Santa Cruz where bearded, long-haired engineers wore shorts and tie-dyed shirts and spent evenings lounging in a huge redwood hot tub, drinking wine and smoking pot.

The Future of Capitalism: Facing the New Anxieties by Paul Collier

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", accounting loophole / creative accounting, Airbnb, An Inconvenient Truth, assortative mating, bank run, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Bob Geldof, bonus culture, business cycle, call centre, central bank independence, centre right, commodity super cycle, computerized trading, corporate governance, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, David Brooks, delayed gratification, deskilling, Donald Trump, eurozone crisis, fake news, financial deregulation, full employment, George Akerlof, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, greed is good, income inequality, industrial cluster, information asymmetry, intangible asset, Jean Tirole, Jeremy Corbyn, job satisfaction, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, late capitalism, loss aversion, Mark Zuckerberg, minimum wage unemployment, moral hazard, negative equity, New Urbanism, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, out of africa, Peace of Westphalia, principal–agent problem, race to the bottom, rent control, rent-seeking, rising living standards, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, sovereign wealth fund, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, too big to fail, trade liberalization, urban planning, web of trust, zero-sum game