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> 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. [1]

Because cyberspace is ascendant over the old powers. Alas, sure, it's a pretty sad capitalist shell of what cyberspace could be, but it's still striding past the encumbered old giants.

[1] https://www.eff.org/cyberspace-independence




I miss being that optimistic. What happened?


What happened was that the silly people who wrote that twaddle managed to forget (somehow) that the millions of miles of fiber optics and copper cabling, the millions of processors that go into servers and backbone routers, the thousands of satellites and microwave links, and so forth are all possible only because of the "Industrial World" and all the uncounted thousands of acres of land on which that infrastructure rests and the businesses that run them are under the jurisdiction of "Governments".

There never was and can never be a cyberspace independent of the physical world. All there was was a brief moment of being ignored until the powers that be realized "Oh, hmm, looks like that Internet thingamajig is kind of important now; better start ruling it."


> I miss being that optimistic. What happened?

The optimism turned out to be naive? I mean, regardless of whatever "cyberspace" was originally imagined to be, in actuality it turned out to be bunch of Facebooks. And more often than not it's allowed low-quality garbage to be spread with unprecedented effectiveness.

Or to summarize in 1996 terminology: cyberspace turned out to be land of timecubes.


The printing press also allowed low-quality garbage to be spread with unprecedented effectiveness.

I'm not convinced that previous systems of more centralized distribution of information (television networks and woodblock printing) were better than the ones that succeeded it.


> The printing press also allowed low-quality garbage to be spread with unprecedented effectiveness.

I'd dispute that, after making one clarification to my original comment: I meant "unprecedented relative effectiveness." At no other time has any rando with a batshit insane idea been able to spread it with near equal access to same the tools people use to spread real knowledge and understanding. To contrast it with the previous system, it's like hiring a bunch of incompetents and then getting rid of code review.


I still believe the pendulum will swing back to something else... internet 2021 is not the final state of the cyberspace, and things will evolve as connectivity, cost of hosting and ubiquity of computer systems increase.

What will be the web once we move to a new 3D / AR media or a metaverse platform? What id the internet become distributed again (I see some seed in blockchain / DAO), or if connectivity become ubiquitous (think smart dust).

We are just at the beginning of this journey, and the GAFAM of today are the IBM of tomorrow.


Cyberspace does not exist in isolation, it's a network reflecting to a large extent the sum of its parts. In the early / mid 90s, before the masses moved in, "cyberspace" was for the most part what Barlow imagined it to be.

The race to the bottom, adtech, consumerist takeover only started when the "stupid" society at large became the majority, so for the west this process was really inevitable. China, being a dictatorship on top of a closed-feedback system and unwilling to let capitalism run unrestricted, has a much better chance of controlling the process and using it to shape society according to a central vision. We should be worried.


dismay is I think due but "turned out to be" is not at all how I see it. the conquest of massified consumerism over the frontier is a true story, but the frontier is still out there, still ready, still awaiting, still vast beyond our wildest imaginings. the excitement of a new liberation, out of corporate data centers & back in to power, back into freedom & exploration, building new connective mediums and places, is more compelling to me personally than ever. and increasingly more feasible, as we get better at developing systems and software.

in the aughs Tim O'Reilly was talking about chasing the alpha geeks. by contrast we seem fixated on the muck & mire of the lowest experiences, these days, and we have few visible free radicals pushing the ascent. I believe the former to be not worthy of fixation, and the latter to be imminently close to rediscovering themselves, & they will be equipped with vastly better means to pioneer onward with.


Software ate the world.

I also remember feeling that optimistic about technology. It wasn’t until this past year, I am getting an inkling of what happened. It’s a continuation of much longer trends that I didn’t see until I started studying Carol Sanford’s work on regenerative paradigms, responsible business, etc.

The dominant worldview these days is that of the machine world view. It sees the world as complex machinery, with people as cogs. It denies the power of living systems to be able to live and grow on their own, instead, forcing them to intermediate through the machine.

As such, software eating the world is a continuation of that worldview.

I think perhaps, this is the “punk” in cyberpunk; that even though people become part of the machine, they can still change the world for the better against old powers. Old powers didn’t understand how the emerging technology works, so there’s a window of time. Perhaps, that, technologists will maintain a tech gap over old powers. But the old powers had been eaten by machines a long time ago, and when new tech companies arose, that machine world view became further entrenched.

It didn’t solve for the fundamental problem: living systems are not machines. We are capable of growing and changing on our own. We are not consumers. We are not users. Living systems are what makes software come alive; why would we want software to eat us?


and down they forgot/as up they grew




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