Erin Kissane, writing in her blog and newsletter: Bad Shape:
Barlow’s Declaration—which is excruciating and which I’ve been making myself reread annually for years as penance for participating in tech culture—ends like this:
We will create a civilization of the Mind in Cyberspace. May it be more humane and fair than the world your governments have made before.
What we got instead was a handful of global-scale company towns that continue to prove their comprehensive unfitness to govern and their absolute vulnerability to the offline governments the free internet was meant to work around.
So sure: Protocols over platforms. Then we have to actually do the inelegant, un-heroic, expensive work of rebuilding the essential structures of human civilization on top of the protocols, because it turns out we just have the one world, online or off, no way out.
And today’s a good day to remind you of all the work yet to be done. Her talk at XOXO last year.
