Disrupt this!

February 8, 2016 2:00 PM

It’s not Cyberspace anymore (from data & society, Medium).

But over the last twenty years, tech has become the underpinning of so many sectors, of so much interaction. Those of us who wanted cyberspace to be universal couldn’t imagine a world in which our dreams got devoured by Silicon Valley.

Tech is truly mainstream — and politically powerful — and yet many in tech still want to see themselves as outsiders.

danah boyd discusses and theorizes about Davos, techno-optimism, and John Perry Barlow's Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, two decades later. Where is the heady "cyberspace" of the 1990s? As boyd succinctly puts it: "The Internet Is Us. Which Us?"

posted by redct (50 comments total)

Boyd does capture something significant there, with her point about how The People of the Internet still think of themselves as a thing apart, denizens of a new world, no matter how powerful they get in this one. There is still a gap there --- there was one of those blinkered comments under the medium piece this morning, about how maybe if we just teach everyone to code that'll do something about inequality. (Making sure the Charlie Buckets of the world have a shot a the golden ticket is better than keeping them strictly for the Veruca Salts, but inequality is the problem that there are only five fucking tickets in the first place, and the only way the rest of us are getting past the factory gate is by signing on as Oompa Loompas.)

There is still the gap, a lack of understanding -- the great and good of Davos spending a week furrowing their brows about robot brains when robot fingers can't reliably turn a doorknob, and all the techies failing to point the latter fact out. But while it's be nice if the powerful had a better understanding of tech's limits, it'd be much, much nicer if the magician's apprentices would move beyond the demand to be left alone with their spell books to get on with things and look up and notice what the broomsticks are actually doing....
posted by Diablevert at 2:41 PM on February 8, 2016 [37 favorites]

^^^slow clap
posted by j_curiouser at 2:51 PM on February 8, 2016 [4 favorites]

I just saw this last night, and it seems relevant: The stirring, prescient, amazingly naive Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace, 20 years on

For all the drugs he admits having taken, Barlow clearly wasn’t so detached from reality as to think that the internet literally required nothing but the willpower of its denizens to flourish. But while it might not have been a “public construction project,” those other weary giants of flesh and steel, the huge telcos, were the ones that built the servers and cables on which it lived. And they had a lot more in common with government than with the new cyber-communards.

posted by teponaztli at 2:54 PM on February 8, 2016

There is a power shift underway and much of the tech sector is ill-equipped to understand its own actions and practices as part of the elite, the powerful. Worse, a collection of unicorns who see themselves as underdogs in a world where instability and inequality are rampant fail to realize that they have a moral responsibility.

I can't think of a better illustration of this than Dia Kayyali's 2015 Chaos Communications Conference talk "The Architecture of a Street Level Panopticon: How Drones, IMSI Catchers, and Cameras are Shaping our Cities".

I do think it's optimistic to assume this state is the result of a misunderstanding or an oversight, though.
posted by ryanshepard at 3:08 PM on February 8, 2016 [4 favorites]

I liked this. I left a comment over there. It's all about the slow "death by a thousand default settings" that the average user has to endure to interact with this miracle appliance-like network. Curious to see how this continues to play out.
posted by jessamyn at 3:11 PM on February 8, 2016 [4 favorites]

I often think back to the 1993 era when some friends and I were running an online information service that at night turned into a multi-line BBS with FidoNet and Usenet feeds, and how that turned into a leased fractional T1 that gave us the Internet, and how we looked forward and thought that if we brought FidoNet, or Usenet, or even, though the economics of this was dubious, the Internet, that grand space we inhabited in the hours when we weren't trying to make a living, Cyberspace, to the world, how changed the world would be.

And some of that we got right. Some we got right in horribly wrong ways.

But mostly we brought the world to Cyberspace. And in the process we destroyed large swaths of it. The Canter & Siegel spam should have been a wake-up call, we thought we could choke off their net access, that the culture of the net would make spamming unattractive, without thinking that personal interest doesn't scale. We saw that people able to find "their tribe" across geographic boundaries, without considering what a huge influx of tourists would do to a community.

To Diablevert's "There is still the gap, a lack of understanding..." The one thing that Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump agree on is that the magic tech wizards will provide crypto backdoors and ways to clamp down on what's communicated. And why shouldn't they think so? Not only has it always been that way in the past, but we have huge economic incentives to maintain a hierarchical internet, to keep Internet on the cable TV model rather than the peer to peer model.

And the communities that we loved are largely gone, ravaged by the onslaught of "social media", of forwarded memes rather than original thought. And by becoming the algorithm by which the web is found, Google has killed the web, turned it into a gazillion awful content farms.

Unfortunately, most of the attempts I've seen to create something new are focused on technical solutions, or interoperability, not on finding the humanity, the community, first.

And really, what are we seeking? The allure of alt.sex.bondage, the community of the hanky code and the BDSM FAQ, has been replaced with speculation about whether, with the loss of the forbidden, BDSM is over. Music piracy is now about being too damned cheap to pay artists, rather than discovering what your local CD store wouldn't possibly carry.

And yet somehow, except for a few isolated exceptions (I count MeFi as one of the last outposts), within that access to everything and everybody we've lost the personal connections that made Usenet and the BBS networks, and even the early web, so damned amazing.
posted by straw at 3:25 PM on February 8, 2016 [36 favorites]

Music piracy is now about being too damned cheap to pay artists, rather than discovering what your local CD store wouldn't possibly carry.

Tell that to the likes of what.cd. To be fair all the amazing torrent trackers that cater to niche obsessives and explorers have become gated communities, but then they had to really.
posted by atoxyl at 4:00 PM on February 8, 2016 [1 favorite]

[at Davos (big international financiers meeting)] as I talked to attendees, I kept bumping into a 1970s science fiction narrative.

Polling error. The big wigs always want a good story and will play along. The guys with the real purse strings will buy a demo if only for fun of a flyer but the big investment is pretty darned conservative (yeah duh).

Interactive TV (no not the silly network 'smart' settop boxes, the TeeVee laptop you're posting on here) is the new newspaper advertising medium. Works pretty darned well (except for niches like locksmiths and that works for someone). All transitions are messier than expected.

I've got a free Amazon EC2 computer window spun up, actually connected through another virtual unix 'box' in europe somewhere just cause dropping a key was easier. I should really keep a live session to my phone... hmm. Cyber was a term that was old and tired long before smart phones, but it just sounds cool. There's a new threshold that no one has got a handle on but soon, there's a lot of computers and with china seeing a market from the raspberry pi basically free (they were giving out on the cover of a magazine). Perhaps the Oculus VR killer app will be cyberspace entry into all these cpu's and a clever way to manage. Just think of the controversy when the first baby is sent home with an implant to interact with the net? All of three hours and everyone will need one for their little cyborg.
posted by sammyo at 4:06 PM on February 8, 2016

" Not only has it always been that way in the past,"

Uhm, what? When has that ever happened?
posted by I-baLL at 4:07 PM on February 8, 2016

Newspapers, television, heck, look at the struggles U.S. publishers had bringing authors like Henry Miller to market, pretty much every mass medium has been controlled by the dominant culture. If there was a scary message, it was suppressed.
posted by straw at 4:09 PM on February 8, 2016

From the article:

They fight as though they are insurgents while they operate as though they are kings.

Man, if there were a more appropriate way to describe how Uber seems to work (the company, not the service), I don't know it. I mean, probably other companies too, but Uber in particular.
posted by mhum at 4:10 PM on February 8, 2016 [14 favorites]

Anyway - on one hand of course the biggest thing that has gone wrong with the web is that it's all about money now. I mean, of course. But whenever I see somebody complaining about the quality of online communities now compared to the good 'ol days I can't shake the thought that really what they are missing is an Internet that was far more elitist in terms of barriers to participation, even though there was a stronger egalitarian feeling among the people who did get to participate.
posted by atoxyl at 4:13 PM on February 8, 2016 [8 favorites]

It felt to me in the article that "tech" was being used to refer both to the technology itself as well as the technology business sector which produces it.

And I think ultimately that's the nature of the problem at hand. If we allow too few faces to claim too many spaces, we'll have all of old media's problems writ large across the new. Technology only democratizes when nobody can establish themselves as a gatekeeper, and that counts exponentially when an organization can settle in as the provider for both the platform and the content. It's quite unlikely that what's best for society will also happen to be profitable for anyone in particular, and that's the point. Technology companies that try to control the future won't be bettering things.

Ideally it would be about the community, but unfortunately, there is no gate without a gatekeeper--and even in a perfectly egalitarian garden, the Chosen Ones themselves will drift in no small numbers, leading to a pushmi-pullyu of sentiment and purpose. It's great to reminisce about the early days of the internet, but as someone whose family had difficulty affording the early days of the internet, that exclusivity came at the cost of the disadvantaged. You can't simultaneously democratize a medium and restore welcoming community to its entirety at the same time. People just don't agree on enough for that.
posted by Phyltre at 4:16 PM on February 8, 2016 [1 favorite]

There never was a "cyberspace" in the manner Barlow and others painted it. Even as he made his naive declaration, it wasn't hard to see where this amazing new toy was headed, if you just kept your eyes open and didn't drink too much cyber-kool-ade. The shadows were already moving in.
posted by Thorzdad at 4:16 PM on February 8, 2016 [5 favorites]

Which is an issue a little bit to the side of the greater economic effects of communication technology.
posted by atoxyl at 4:17 PM on February 8, 2016

I left tech in the mid-nighties to chase dreams while I was young and failing was easier. One reason, though not the only reason, was that I could see computers were not going to liberate the dispossessed. My thought was it would only reinforce existing power structures.

In the end, after many side roads and minor adventures, I returned to computer land to make a living that wasn't fighting for scraps. It really is a challenge finding work in tech that doesn't just contribute to the tired, old, rat-race.
posted by Strange_Robinson at 4:18 PM on February 8, 2016 [2 favorites]

can't shake the thought that really what they are missing is an Internet that was far more elitist in terms of barriers to participation, even though there was a stronger egalitarian feeling among the people who did get to participate.

Of course I miss that! It was fun being in on something that wasn't yet a mass medium. Then they let the damn AOL users in.
posted by thelonius at 4:19 PM on February 8, 2016 [3 favorites]

My feeling is the Internet reached its height as a reflection of the people who used it in about 2005. That was when everyone was blogging or commenting on message boards, or sharing their photos and music or even still making weird little websites by hand. Then came Facebook and Twitter and social networking, and the Internet was slowly transformed into a digital representation of the real world where you interacted with your friends, instead of a different world where you expressed yourself and had no idea who was watching.
posted by Kevin Street at 4:34 PM on February 8, 2016 [7 favorites]

There's still pieces of that old paradigm left in places like YouTube, but it's become heavily commercialized.
posted by Kevin Street at 4:37 PM on February 8, 2016

They fight as though they are insurgents while they operate as though they are kings.

While not specifically related to tech, I view significant levels of the food and drink world as falling sway to the above sentence. Then again, so much of the tech/geek/nerd mentality has made its way into the food and drink world, so maybe it is appropriate to mention here and not a real sidetrack.
posted by stannate at 4:37 PM on February 8, 2016

And people worked very hard to make that transformation, to turn the Internet from an eclectic creation of hobbyists and kids and government scientists into a mass medium dominated by centralized destinations, that you can effectively use to track people and sell ads.
posted by thelonius at 4:41 PM on February 8, 2016 [5 favorites]

It’s not Cyberspace anymore

clue: it never was.
posted by quonsar II: smock fishpants and the temple of foon at 4:50 PM on February 8, 2016 [2 favorites]

I interviewed Barlow once. He seemed pretty sharp. And yet.....

It's all about the money. The wild west became cattle country. Did you know Barlow was a rancher? And yet still, a kind of hippie?

Anyway, like I said, he seemed pretty sharp. But this thing we talk on here, this community, is so far removed from what the internet has become, well, it's beautiful, really. And we know this. There used to be this thing called The Well. They all hung out there, the first generation.

Barlow was a nice enough guy. But sharp. When I told him I was on assignment for Ziff-Davis, he smirked to me, "I'd rather be a subject of Ziff-Davis than an object of Ziff-Davis." Sharp.

Most of the internet is a mall, now. A mall that watches everything you do. The other parts? Still interesting. But (on preview) cyberspace? Not hardly. It's CB radio turned into Network TV. Or Mom and Pop turned into Big Box Store. Or, the wild west turned into a cattle ranch.
posted by valkane at 5:00 PM on February 8, 2016 [3 favorites]

There's more high-quality content available today, and for more types of people (i.e., not just academics and hobbyists), than was ever available to the Internet users of 1995. Perhaps the signal:noise ratio has fallen, but the content is there. I hesitate to make an unprovable claim about the Internet being a net-positive for the world but, to take just a single example, organizations like It Gets Better are doing things to improve lives which would be much more difficult in a world without the Internet.

I definitely agree with boyd about Silicon Valley engineers and executives needing to act with a greater sense of moral responsibility given the pervasiveness of communications tech in daily life.
posted by anifinder at 5:06 PM on February 8, 2016 [1 favorite]

I remember the 90s and the optimism that was so much like the 60s--"it's a whole new world and things are going to be different this time". Everything from cyberspace to smart drinks to politics to family life was going to be different, better, and shiny.
I was skeptical then, but I still hoped things might change.
I miss that optimism. What I try to keep in mind is that day to day decisions, hard work, and keeping the principles and goals in mind are what matters. This isn't an optimistic era, but we can still do our part day by day.
posted by librosegretti at 5:06 PM on February 8, 2016 [3 favorites]

I hadn't read it before, but Barlow's Declaration seems terribly naive. I see that he's trying to be grandiose and revolutionary, but phrases like "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." and "Our identities have no bodies, so, unlike you, we cannot obtain order by physical coercion." speak more to some kind of trans-humanist utopian vision of society rather than any real changes to current society from the increasingly powerful communications platform of the Internet.

The Internet is a massive platform that allows tools to be built on it, and those tools can be used for good or evil. The nature of the Internet resists censorship, but mass media tools of persuasion continue unabated. All the parts of the internet from 1996 are still around, in one form or another, but it turns out that the bulk of the billion or so people who got online since then aren't as interested in academic discourse, cypherpunk activism, or revolutionary thought as the users back then. And that makes sense: if they were, the revolution would have already happened.
posted by demiurge at 5:10 PM on February 8, 2016 [1 favorite]

Kevin Street: "Then came Facebook and Twitter and social networking, and the Internet was slowly transformed into a digital representation of the real world where you interacted with your friends,"

Which goes pretty far explaining why I never really got twitter, facebook or 'social' in general. Seems like mostly repeating the same boring interactions I have no interest in IRL. I mean, if I wanted to stay friends with my classmates, I'd stay friends with my classmates, no?
posted by signal at 5:12 PM on February 8, 2016 [3 favorites]

I remember the 90s and the optimism that was so much like the 60s... I miss that optimism.

"1/Younger Millennials - people now 23 through 29 - don't really understand the 1990s, and how amazing they were. So I want to explain..."
posted by kliuless at 5:25 PM on February 8, 2016 [5 favorites]

"There's more high-quality content available today, and for more types of people (i.e., not just academics and hobbyists), than was ever available to the Internet users of 1995. Perhaps the signal:noise ratio has fallen, but the content is there."

That's true. There's a lot more available if you know where to look, because monetization meant a rise of professionalism in many areas, and there's also the non-profit organizations (like Khan Academy) that have opened up many new options to everyone.
posted by Kevin Street at 5:27 PM on February 8, 2016 [1 favorite]

I hadn't read it before, but Barlow's Declaration seems terribly naive.

It was terribly naïve even back in 1996. By then media, telco, & other commercial organisations were moving in, and it was quite obvious that (a) what they wanted was to make the internet be the same as what they already had - for them to be your gateway to [whatever realm they operated in], and (b) what they wanted they were going to get, or destroy it trying.
posted by Pinback at 5:40 PM on February 8, 2016 [4 favorites]

Kevin Street: this is one point that I definitely agree upon with you. Monetization isn't necessarily a dirty word when it comes with professionalism—and, as you rightly point out with Khan Academy, professionalism isn't solely dependent on selling something. I'm of the hope that online learning done right will be one of the bright spots of the Internet of the next decade or so.
posted by redct at 5:47 PM on February 8, 2016

It was terribly naïve even back in 1996

Still, it got him a spot on EFF. Which maybe he still holds? I dunno, I stopped following this shit when I gave up journalism.
posted by valkane at 5:48 PM on February 8, 2016

Whoa, that JPB manifesto is a heap of cringe-making old wank. It sounds so dated it might as well be from the age of Gernsback.
posted by scruss at 5:54 PM on February 8, 2016 [1 favorite]

Meh. Professional BBS's were a thing in the '80s. Compuserve and AOL were things in the '80s. There was, as ever, a push to decentralization. Right now, we're coming past the arc of a new round of centralization, and right into fragmentation - Google-Facebook-Twitter-Dropbox no longer has a hammerlock on the internet, and the giants are contending with innumerable upstarts and well funded forays from rival giants.

More, we can see the pendulum swinging around again to decentralization.

Paranoid visions of a closed internet are diminishing as the deep web flourishes and blockchain apps find their feet. These will be driven in equal part by mercenaries and idealists, renegades and risk-tolerant, deep-pocketed parts of the establishment. It's been like this for a looooooong time, and has offered more good than bad in the aggregate.
posted by Slap*Happy at 6:02 PM on February 8, 2016 [1 favorite]

These will be driven in equal part by mercenaries and idealists, renegades and risk-tolerant, deep-pocketed parts of the establishment.

I like the cut of your jib. Do you have a newsletter?
posted by valkane at 6:51 PM on February 8, 2016 [1 favorite]

Still, it got him a spot on EFF.

Pretty sure his spot on EFF was first by five years.
posted by ridgerunner at 6:52 PM on February 8, 2016 [3 favorites]

Whoa, that JPB manifesto is a heap of cringe-making old wank. It sounds so dated it might as well be from the age of Gernsback.

At the time it wasn't. In the context of things happening then it sounded like a pretty good summation of the situation as it stood. There's a swagger in it because at the time it felt like we were winning. Well, that didn't happen exactly. I'm not sure if this period will be remembered as a new Renaissance or the start of the Counter-Reformation. We live in interesting times.
posted by um at 6:53 PM on February 8, 2016 [5 favorites]

...for them to be your gateway to [whatever realm they operated in], and (b) what they wanted they were going to get, or destroy it trying.

Nah, MeFi is a good successor to The Well, Tumblr works as Bianca's Smut Shack and Google almost replaces Jason's Links to the Underground.
posted by ridgerunner at 7:08 PM on February 8, 2016

I'd like to carve out a paragraph or two here to remind you that there's another technical reason that we're all living in walled gardens these days. We can't trust our operating systems, and that severely limits our ability to experiment with new ways of doing things.

Example: If I put a binary video file in a folder on a web site, usability aside, who is really willing to view the thing on their pc or phone? Nobody, be cause it might have malware embedded in it somehow... same with JPEGS, PDFs, music, etc. We can't trust data on the internet because it might have code in it somewhere.

So, as a result, we all use walled gardens like Facebook and Youtube because it's MUCH safer to do so, and there's the whole usability thing, and reputation as well.

It used to be that we had machines with 2 floppy diskettes... which were tiny in terms of storage (some later ones got up to 1.4 megabytes... whooo hooo)... but the OS was write protected, and you could make copies of it easily, and test those copies trivially. You never had to worry about lunching your system and racking up a hundred dollar+ repair bill, or losing all your stuff.

Operating systems can be made secure, but that's a discussion best left for another day.
posted by MikeWarot at 9:04 PM on February 8, 2016

Going to Davos and listening to The Tech Industry to get a feel for how things are going here in the "cyberspace" of 2016 is like going to an International Telecommunication Union conference in the 90's to understand it then, in that you'll naturally be missing almost all the interesting stuff.

Cryptome is still up and running, if you want to feel like you're back in 1996, so things can't be all that bad.
posted by sfenders at 9:26 PM on February 8, 2016

Barlow (co-)founded the EFF.
posted by mbrubeck at 9:53 PM on February 8, 2016 [1 favorite]

Nah, MeFi is a good successor to The Well

This is true. A large number of The Well's inhabitants had an massively overinflated sense of its inclusivity and accessibility too.

Look I was there in the 90s like a lot of you and to me the leaders of the cyber revolution looked like younger versions of those already in power. A lot of them grew up and did just that.

Newspapers, television, heck, look at the struggles U.S. publishers had bringing authors like Henry Miller to market, pretty much every mass medium has been controlled by the dominant culture. If there was a scary message, it was suppressed.

So they created a "place" were they were the dominant culture.

If you want power for the people, then fucking give it to them and cross your fingers really hard.
Oh, I forgot the AOL jokes.
posted by fullerine at 10:30 PM on February 8, 2016 [3 favorites]

There was some kind of... incident or something, years ago, where someone on Mefi made a post about Davos that linked to the work of a female journalist, and that got the journalist to come here and make scathing remarks about Mefi. She couldn't understand what we were all doing wasting our time here, when the people there were doing important stuff. Or something like that. I'm sure it happened.
posted by Kevin Street at 1:11 AM on February 9, 2016

This was it! Laurie Garrett was never on Mefi, but she emailed beagle to express her dismay at this "wasted community." Davos disconnect in action.
posted by Kevin Street at 1:18 AM on February 9, 2016 [2 favorites]

Gotta say I thought at the time she was pretty spot-on, and … what, 13 years later? … I still think her criticisms are pretty much on the money.
posted by Pinback at 4:20 AM on February 9, 2016 [1 favorite]

I remember the 90s and the optimism that was so much like the 60s... I miss that optimism.

We did stop those CD longboxes, man.
posted by thelonius at 6:13 AM on February 9, 2016 [4 favorites]

> At the time it wasn't.

I remember it at the time, and it did feel ... quaint, at best.
posted by scruss at 7:07 AM on February 9, 2016

... I can't shake the thought that really what they are missing is an Internet that was far more elitist in terms of barriers to participation...

Well, yeah. "Cyberspace" created a filter that wasn't geographic, but it was definitely there. And, really, filtering is the challenge of the next generation of "social media": Twitter is pretty much unusable without Randi Harper's GGAutoBlocker. I'd similarly toss money towards a Google that excluded all Food Network results from recipe searches. YouTube comments, or pretty much all of StackExchange, are what happens when you let the world in without some sense of elitism.

In my desire to discover more ideas, to, in bumper sticker terms "subvert the dominant paradigm", I can't hear all voices: that cacophony just leads to the louder culture drowning out the interesting bits.

And no filter is perfect.

But whatever the actual elitist implications of the "you must have a computer and a modem and a desire to spend a bunch of time re-dialing through busy signals" was then (and I don't mean to minimize those impacts, I went through my capital-L Libertarian asshole phase), that perturbed the normal enough that we actually started to have these conversations about privilege at a grander scale (ie; I'm an ex-capital-L Libertarian asshole).

And now we need another set of filters to find and amplify the voices on the fringes.
posted by straw at 7:31 AM on February 9, 2016

William Gibson's basically been pointing this out for years.
posted by sparkletone at 2:52 PM on February 9, 2016

"How were they weird?"

"Hoodoos. Thought the matrix was full of mambos 'n' shit. Wanna know something, Moll?"

"What?"

"They're right."
posted by Rash at 11:00 PM on February 9, 2016