“Digital man was born free, but everywhere he is in chains.” So we have been told by a wide array of Jeremiahs as Web 2.0’s manifold discontents have become impossible to ignore. Accounts of the exact nature and cause of this fall from grace vary, but they share a grounding assumption that the assemblage of technologies known as “the internet” once embodied (or at least had the potential to) certain fundamental political values—free expression, privacy, individuality—and at some point ceased to do so.
This prelapsarian vision was influentially inscribed in a founding text of the tech canon, composed in 1996: John Perry Barlow’s cyber-libertarian “Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace.” Barlow, a former Grateful Dead lyricist exemplary of the ideological migration historian Fred Turner has traced “from counterculture to cyberculture,” declared to the world’s governments that “the global social space we are building [is] 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.” As recently as ten years ago, when the success of a number of insurrections against tyrannical governments were being credited to Facebook and Twitter, this proclamation still resonated. Now, its optimism is barely recognizable.
