To me, the physical world is a realm permitted only to those with wealth. The author beautifully romanticizes the evaporation of tangible labor, but the physical labor I actually experienced meant unpaid, stolen wages. It meant working through the night, dozing off on the early morning subway until the very last stop, and enduring endless contempt, humiliation, and the toxic community that came with it.
I sought a new community in cyberspace, and the world claims that this space rewards you. But looking at it now, that structure also seems reserved for a very specific class. Especially with the advent of AI, it feels like the time I had left to learn and actually build something has run out.
Cyberspace, which I chose as an escape, is ultimately dominated by real-world capital. And if you want to catch up to the early settlers, there isn't much you can do as a citizen of the Third World. Between China's self-sustaining ecosystem and America's global standard, there is no place for me. The physical frontier is closed, and I arrived too late even for the cyber frontier.
Language barriers, capital, platforms—they form just another rigid hierarchy. To enter the open-source world, someone from the periphery must learn English, assimilate into its cultural nuances, and master programming languages that are inherently far more difficult to learn if your native tongue is not English. There are countless more gates to pass through, yet the seats are strictly limited.
This essay spoke of a free and open frontier, but for someone like me, it is merely standing outside a shining castle, longing for it, shouting for someone to open the gates. But I do not possess the skills that the people inside that castle desire and admire.
I have merely migrated from a physical colony to a digital one. How much longer can I be consumed like this?
Sometimes, the inside of that castle—as seen on HN—looks so warm.
But my reality is always cold.
I simply envy those who were privileged enough to experience the 90s cyber-romanticism portrayed in this essay.
You don’t have to be privileged to live in the physical world. I quit programming to make candles for years, then apartment maintenance, now in the trades. I make 1/3 what I was making doing digital work, and I’d take a pay cut before returning.
The reasons I had for leaving were manifold, but the big two were wanting to quit Adderall and having read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. It’s a hard road to live a life in which I want to maximize the /quality/ of my minute-to-minute experience. It involves being very honest with myself about what I want to and don’t want to be doing. I know I want to look at a screen for work like I want a hole in the head.
If you want to jump into the physical world, become a janitor. The work is surprisingly satisfying. You spend all day fixing tangible problems that increase everyone’s quality of life.
I think Barlow, like all counter culturalists or hippies, was first and foremost a romantic. Him entering the new information age only after leaving his farm in -87 is quite apocryphal - dude hanged out at Warhol’s Factory and wrote songs for Grateful Dead for crying out loud. He is cleverly using the romantic image of Wild West and the Cowboy criticising its commercialisation while at the same time claiming its authenticity to himself and using it for his own purposes to market something else than cigarettes. It’s not necessarily a bad thing, but it is what it is.
I was driving on a work trip in the rural regions of my country passing a railway crew. They were replacing the tracks I had been laying there as part of a crew some 15 years ago. I liked the outdoors, being middle of the literal nowhere middle of a bright summer knight, the manual labour, the fact that you were constantly up against the elements, even the rain, cold, scorching heat. I didn’t own a smart phone back then and little use it would have been with no connection. So I know a little bit what Barlow writes about.
Now I earn my weeks salary laying down railway tracks by driving 250km to punch bunch of digits into a machine to make it connect to a network and then driving back. The great planes were taken over by robber barons, oil titans, mining companies, the Rockefellers and Hearsts, the Electronic Frontier is now filled with barbed wire and information mines by the new Cyber Industrialists of the likes of Zuck, Bezos, Altman, Musk. Barlow is a Marlboro man of the Electronic Good Ole Days gone past.
I don’t really have a point. You can still go and run in the rain or snow, you can carve things out wood or fix things with your own hands. You can remove yourself - you must - from these virtual madhouses Meta etc. shove your face constantly and try to find your own tribe elsewhere. You can install Linux on old machine and start coding your own tools in C or Python without language models doing your thinking for you. The world is full of great books and great art accessible 24/7 for free, if you know where to look for.
You can be free still. But lamenting after the last cowboy won’t help. We must accept that we live in two worlds constantly today. Schizoid as it might be, having our toes dug into the moist dirt might keep us sane in the maddening glass world of the virtual casino the world has become.
I sympathize strongly with you, but your cyberspace escape is getting worse by the year. I'd say I'm planning my escape but I'm working in tech and I'm not sure I have a path out.
I disagree because the tools for self-learning, self-instruction and self-expression which exist now through cyberspace and computers are better than ever for those who are motivated to use them.
> Especially with the advent of AI, it feels like the time I had left to learn and actually build something has run out.
Why? Just go build stuff! AI makes an excellent tutor assuming you can exhibit a bit of self awareness and ask directed questions.
> yet the seats are strictly limited.
Why do you say that?
> But I do not possess the skills that the people inside that castle desire and admire.
I appreciate the seemingly unfair added difficulty of integrating as a foreigner. But as far as not possessing the desired skills, what's preventing you from learning them on your own?
My guess (and hope) is that next generations will find more meaning in physical labor, communal living etc, partly out of necessity (what young person can afford to buy even a small, simple home these days?) but mostly because they seem to understand that we've screwed the environment enough at this point and the novelty with things like social media is beginning to wear off. As much as kids are glued to their iPads, they also seem to understand that what we are doing to the environment is not sustainable and that unchecked capitalism is not as great as it is hyped to be.
We already see things like tiny house movement taking off (lots of young people even building these tiny homes themselves). As older farmers retire/die, now is a good time for younger folks to get into farming, even if it is too damn hard these days for small farmers.
I think this was written in 1994 for this conference https://seclists.org/interesting-people/1994/Mar/64 , but I'm not 100% sure. It refers to "last summer's coup in the Soviet Union" which may also date it. Maybe it should have a (1994) in the title. Or, I don't know, maybe it's from even earlier? Some of the other pieces have nice dates at the bottom, like the Declaration of Independence for Cyberspace a bit over 30 years ago. EDIT: @karel-3d elsethread seems to think this one is (1998).
It would presumably be the August 1991 coup if it were the Soviet Union, as it was one of the factors leading to the USSR dissolving at the end of the year. The Autumn 1993 coup was in the Russian Federation (and the geriatric plotters in the Kremlin kinda won that one). So 1992?
Several bibliographic references put the article to 1993 or 1992. The Soviet coup quote would confirm 1992. There was more than one HyperNetwork Conference in Oita, the first one was in 1990. Maybe it was annual or biannual.
> I believe most of this activity is a giant make-work project designed to keep us out of trouble and on the payroll while Asian robots churn out most of the physical things we really need...
Asian, yes. Robots, no (or at least not in the sense of the sci-fi image of one man in a factory whose only job is to press "start" at the beginning of the shift and "stop ad the end of the shift). We didn't abolish the labor, we reduced it a bit and moved it away from us.
[edit]
Productivity in Asia was even lower when this article was written (no date, but mentions that there are 800,000 computers on the internet).
His "A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace" was the most unintentionally comical thing I read at the time. Like his lyrics and prose it was woefully pretentious & leaden.
I also met him once. A more unpleasant, up his own ass, person I can barely recall.
Checks out. I could barely make it past the first paragraphs.
"Like very few Americans of my generation, I come from the physical world. ...earning a living from things I could touch and smell."
What is the majority of the workforce doing, then? People working in fast food, welders, plumbers, carpenters, laborers, people working in slaughterhouses, janitors, cooks, waitstaff, the people working at the grocery store and gas station, people that stay at home and take care of their children? All of them are demoted from reality? Can't touch or smell any of that? Poor struggles in the city don't count?
I forced myself through several more paragraphs before I let myself post, but could barely keep my rolling eyes on the text. "We, we, we..." We were the toughest, the hardest, the roughest. The unstated implication being that the rest of us soft, inner-city, fake Americans could never relate to the realness. Blah, blah, blah. How about some humility, things have been pretty tough and unfair and extreme and real for a lot of people in a lot of places. People have real relationships and peculiarities wherever they might live.
I don't know, maybe the article goes further than that, but I couldn't force any more of it down.
Great, anything else nonconstructive to add about the actual article, or you just felt like this was a good moment to try to put down another human for no reason?
Anyone see a link to the audio / video, or better transcription? The text seems to have been transcribed and the typos / mistakes are splitting the intended meanings of things. Some of which seem to be causing misunderstandings in here. (Dialup for the day here, or I'd do it myself)
I was ranting about the demise of American manufacturing as I was entering the workforce forty years ago, and it seems that nothing has improved in that sphere. Sure, dismantling General Electric produced a supernova of shareholder value, but the problem with supernovas is that once they're done, they're done.
He's describing my great grandmother's childhood in territorial Arizona, down to the riding a horse to a one-room school house. Her family were all tough ranchers living a lifestyle most of us can't really comprehend.
Insightful, funny, colorful, visionary in places & not a speck of naivety in sight. Well worth the read.
"(..) tending to favor the creation of small, fast-moving, short-lived adhocracies...digitized hunter-gatherer groups roaming the steppes of Cyberspace."
They're called startups. Or hacker groups, if you will. Not much difference between those 2 imho.
“Here, guns were part of the furniture, and my taciturn neighbors used them on one another with heart-breaking regularity. These domestic killers rarely went to jail, since they could usually remind the jury that the deceased, whom most of the jurors knew, needed killing anyway.”
It’s enjoyable reading, but I realized the author wasn’t to be taken seriously at this point.
C’mon, isn’t he obviously channeling Mark Twain and the long American tradition of a tall tale? Here’s a British version of the old men reminiscing: “ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VKHFZBUTA4k”
"While these electronic thickets may afford the best guerrilla jungle that ever harbored discontents, certain kinds of technological development could render it as flat and barren of hiding places as the salt deserts of the American West."
Reading this essay brought tears to my eyes.
To me, the physical world is a realm permitted only to those with wealth. The author beautifully romanticizes the evaporation of tangible labor, but the physical labor I actually experienced meant unpaid, stolen wages. It meant working through the night, dozing off on the early morning subway until the very last stop, and enduring endless contempt, humiliation, and the toxic community that came with it.
I sought a new community in cyberspace, and the world claims that this space rewards you. But looking at it now, that structure also seems reserved for a very specific class. Especially with the advent of AI, it feels like the time I had left to learn and actually build something has run out.
Cyberspace, which I chose as an escape, is ultimately dominated by real-world capital. And if you want to catch up to the early settlers, there isn't much you can do as a citizen of the Third World. Between China's self-sustaining ecosystem and America's global standard, there is no place for me. The physical frontier is closed, and I arrived too late even for the cyber frontier.
Language barriers, capital, platforms—they form just another rigid hierarchy. To enter the open-source world, someone from the periphery must learn English, assimilate into its cultural nuances, and master programming languages that are inherently far more difficult to learn if your native tongue is not English. There are countless more gates to pass through, yet the seats are strictly limited.
This essay spoke of a free and open frontier, but for someone like me, it is merely standing outside a shining castle, longing for it, shouting for someone to open the gates. But I do not possess the skills that the people inside that castle desire and admire.
I have merely migrated from a physical colony to a digital one. How much longer can I be consumed like this? Sometimes, the inside of that castle—as seen on HN—looks so warm. But my reality is always cold. I simply envy those who were privileged enough to experience the 90s cyber-romanticism portrayed in this essay.
You don’t have to be privileged to live in the physical world. I quit programming to make candles for years, then apartment maintenance, now in the trades. I make 1/3 what I was making doing digital work, and I’d take a pay cut before returning.
The reasons I had for leaving were manifold, but the big two were wanting to quit Adderall and having read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. It’s a hard road to live a life in which I want to maximize the /quality/ of my minute-to-minute experience. It involves being very honest with myself about what I want to and don’t want to be doing. I know I want to look at a screen for work like I want a hole in the head.
If you want to jump into the physical world, become a janitor. The work is surprisingly satisfying. You spend all day fixing tangible problems that increase everyone’s quality of life.
I think Barlow, like all counter culturalists or hippies, was first and foremost a romantic. Him entering the new information age only after leaving his farm in -87 is quite apocryphal - dude hanged out at Warhol’s Factory and wrote songs for Grateful Dead for crying out loud. He is cleverly using the romantic image of Wild West and the Cowboy criticising its commercialisation while at the same time claiming its authenticity to himself and using it for his own purposes to market something else than cigarettes. It’s not necessarily a bad thing, but it is what it is.
I was driving on a work trip in the rural regions of my country passing a railway crew. They were replacing the tracks I had been laying there as part of a crew some 15 years ago. I liked the outdoors, being middle of the literal nowhere middle of a bright summer knight, the manual labour, the fact that you were constantly up against the elements, even the rain, cold, scorching heat. I didn’t own a smart phone back then and little use it would have been with no connection. So I know a little bit what Barlow writes about.
Now I earn my weeks salary laying down railway tracks by driving 250km to punch bunch of digits into a machine to make it connect to a network and then driving back. The great planes were taken over by robber barons, oil titans, mining companies, the Rockefellers and Hearsts, the Electronic Frontier is now filled with barbed wire and information mines by the new Cyber Industrialists of the likes of Zuck, Bezos, Altman, Musk. Barlow is a Marlboro man of the Electronic Good Ole Days gone past.
I don’t really have a point. You can still go and run in the rain or snow, you can carve things out wood or fix things with your own hands. You can remove yourself - you must - from these virtual madhouses Meta etc. shove your face constantly and try to find your own tribe elsewhere. You can install Linux on old machine and start coding your own tools in C or Python without language models doing your thinking for you. The world is full of great books and great art accessible 24/7 for free, if you know where to look for.
You can be free still. But lamenting after the last cowboy won’t help. We must accept that we live in two worlds constantly today. Schizoid as it might be, having our toes dug into the moist dirt might keep us sane in the maddening glass world of the virtual casino the world has become.
I sympathize strongly with you, but your cyberspace escape is getting worse by the year. I'd say I'm planning my escape but I'm working in tech and I'm not sure I have a path out.
I disagree because the tools for self-learning, self-instruction and self-expression which exist now through cyberspace and computers are better than ever for those who are motivated to use them.
> Especially with the advent of AI, it feels like the time I had left to learn and actually build something has run out.
Why? Just go build stuff! AI makes an excellent tutor assuming you can exhibit a bit of self awareness and ask directed questions.
> yet the seats are strictly limited.
Why do you say that?
> But I do not possess the skills that the people inside that castle desire and admire.
I appreciate the seemingly unfair added difficulty of integrating as a foreigner. But as far as not possessing the desired skills, what's preventing you from learning them on your own?
My guess (and hope) is that next generations will find more meaning in physical labor, communal living etc, partly out of necessity (what young person can afford to buy even a small, simple home these days?) but mostly because they seem to understand that we've screwed the environment enough at this point and the novelty with things like social media is beginning to wear off. As much as kids are glued to their iPads, they also seem to understand that what we are doing to the environment is not sustainable and that unchecked capitalism is not as great as it is hyped to be.
We already see things like tiny house movement taking off (lots of young people even building these tiny homes themselves). As older farmers retire/die, now is a good time for younger folks to get into farming, even if it is too damn hard these days for small farmers.
This was beautifully put. Lovely writing, and I agree; the current system is a recipe for anxiety.
Beautifully well said.
That's a weird take, IMO, the physical world is much more oriented around not being wealthy and you can still find plenty of community online.
And your English seems fine.
90s / early 2000s internet was awesome though.
I think this was written in 1994 for this conference https://seclists.org/interesting-people/1994/Mar/64 , but I'm not 100% sure. It refers to "last summer's coup in the Soviet Union" which may also date it. Maybe it should have a (1994) in the title. Or, I don't know, maybe it's from even earlier? Some of the other pieces have nice dates at the bottom, like the Declaration of Independence for Cyberspace a bit over 30 years ago. EDIT: @karel-3d elsethread seems to think this one is (1998).
It would presumably be the August 1991 coup if it were the Soviet Union, as it was one of the factors leading to the USSR dissolving at the end of the year. The Autumn 1993 coup was in the Russian Federation (and the geriatric plotters in the Kremlin kinda won that one). So 1992?
Several bibliographic references put the article to 1993 or 1992. The Soviet coup quote would confirm 1992. There was more than one HyperNetwork Conference in Oita, the first one was in 1990. Maybe it was annual or biannual.
> I believe most of this activity is a giant make-work project designed to keep us out of trouble and on the payroll while Asian robots churn out most of the physical things we really need...
Asian, yes. Robots, no (or at least not in the sense of the sci-fi image of one man in a factory whose only job is to press "start" at the beginning of the shift and "stop ad the end of the shift). We didn't abolish the labor, we reduced it a bit and moved it away from us.
[edit]
Productivity in Asia was even lower when this article was written (no date, but mentions that there are 800,000 computers on the internet).
His "A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace" was the most unintentionally comical thing I read at the time. Like his lyrics and prose it was woefully pretentious & leaden. I also met him once. A more unpleasant, up his own ass, person I can barely recall.
Checks out. I could barely make it past the first paragraphs.
"Like very few Americans of my generation, I come from the physical world. ...earning a living from things I could touch and smell."
What is the majority of the workforce doing, then? People working in fast food, welders, plumbers, carpenters, laborers, people working in slaughterhouses, janitors, cooks, waitstaff, the people working at the grocery store and gas station, people that stay at home and take care of their children? All of them are demoted from reality? Can't touch or smell any of that? Poor struggles in the city don't count?
I forced myself through several more paragraphs before I let myself post, but could barely keep my rolling eyes on the text. "We, we, we..." We were the toughest, the hardest, the roughest. The unstated implication being that the rest of us soft, inner-city, fake Americans could never relate to the realness. Blah, blah, blah. How about some humility, things have been pretty tough and unfair and extreme and real for a lot of people in a lot of places. People have real relationships and peculiarities wherever they might live.
I don't know, maybe the article goes further than that, but I couldn't force any more of it down.
Yeah, well, that’s just, like, your opinion, man.
Great, anything else nonconstructive to add about the actual article, or you just felt like this was a good moment to try to put down another human for no reason?
Anyone see a link to the audio / video, or better transcription? The text seems to have been transcribed and the typos / mistakes are splitting the intended meanings of things. Some of which seem to be causing misunderstandings in here. (Dialup for the day here, or I'd do it myself)
> bytes which no one can chew, architecture no one can inhabit, and software which keeps no cold winter wind from anyone's bodies.
this hits hard.
hopefully we can start making physical stuff again & teaching kids how to do so.
I was ranting about the demise of American manufacturing as I was entering the workforce forty years ago, and it seems that nothing has improved in that sphere. Sure, dismantling General Electric produced a supernova of shareholder value, but the problem with supernovas is that once they're done, they're done.
He's describing my great grandmother's childhood in territorial Arizona, down to the riding a horse to a one-room school house. Her family were all tough ranchers living a lifestyle most of us can't really comprehend.
Insightful, funny, colorful, visionary in places & not a speck of naivety in sight. Well worth the read.
"(..) tending to favor the creation of small, fast-moving, short-lived adhocracies...digitized hunter-gatherer groups roaming the steppes of Cyberspace."
They're called startups. Or hacker groups, if you will. Not much difference between those 2 imho.
Masterclass in navel gazing
Reminds me of Wendell Berry or even Cormac Mccarthy's writing. Great piece.
(1992)
(1998)
edit: so 1994
“Here, guns were part of the furniture, and my taciturn neighbors used them on one another with heart-breaking regularity. These domestic killers rarely went to jail, since they could usually remind the jury that the deceased, whom most of the jurors knew, needed killing anyway.”
It’s enjoyable reading, but I realized the author wasn’t to be taken seriously at this point.
C’mon, isn’t he obviously channeling Mark Twain and the long American tradition of a tall tale? Here’s a British version of the old men reminiscing: “ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VKHFZBUTA4k”
Please explain.
"While these electronic thickets may afford the best guerrilla jungle that ever harbored discontents, certain kinds of technological development could render it as flat and barren of hiding places as the salt deserts of the American West."