John Perry Barlow, Internet Pioneer, 1947-2018

"Now, that vision is fraying. The social fabric of the internet is built on very specific assumptions, many of which are giving way. Licklider envisioned the internet as a patchwork of decentralized networks, with no sense of how it would work when a handful of companies wrote most of its software and managed most of its traffic. Licklider conceive... See more

A Declaration of the Interdependence of Cyberspace. A r evision of John Perry Barlow’s 1996 Declaration for the Independence of Cyberspace (view the diff here). It is also a reaction to Facebook’s recent rebranding as Meta, and to the dominance of large, centralized companies on today’s Internet, those we refer to in the document as the "Closed Fie... See more

In Internet for the People, leading tech writer Ben Tarnoff offers an answer. The internet is broken, he argues, because it is owned by private firms and run for profit. Google annihilates your privacy and Facebook amplifies right-wing propaganda because it is profitable to do so. But the internet wasn't always like this—it had to be remade for the... See more

Michael Goldhaber is the internet prophet you’ve never heard of. Here’s a short list of things he saw coming: the complete dominance of the internet, increased shamelessness in politics, terrorists co-opting social media, the rise of reality television, personal websites, oversharing, personal essay, fandoms and online influencer culture — along wi... See more

À Battery Park chaque samedi après-midi, je dégustais la tribune hebdomadaire du professeur Lessig. Jeune avocat spécialiste de droit d’auteur, il était la caution morale de l’Internet. Son étoile du Berger. En pleine extase capitaliste, il s’acharnait dans le rôle du rabat-joie de service. Dès 1997, dans un article ravageur « Code is law », il ava

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À l’époque, Julian Assange, Bradley Manning, hackers et lanceurs d’alerte, ridiculisaient les citadelles, gouvernements comme multinationales. Aaron se fichait de révéler leurs secrets pour les affaiblir. Esthète de l’intérêt général, il misait sur « la sagesse des foules », le désir inné des individus – humains, si humains, pensait-il –, d’apprend

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“Any information that’s gathered on you, if it’s not sold by you or you don’t authorize it is theft” – John Robb