Internet Evolution

How “free” is the internet?

“The Closing of the Internet Mind,” written by multiple authors and published at The American Mind, offers compelling evidence that however you might answer that question, you can be sure the measure of freedom is shrinking as we speak.

In its tracing of several declarations of internet purpose since 1996, the article is worth reading for its insightful commentary as well as its documentation of history in the battle for the internet as a freedom-first, democratic institution. What’s interesting to me is that each of the three declarations quoted are essentially defensive. They are responding to threats — though the nature of the threats has evolved. John Perry Barlow in 1996 wrote against the Telecommunications Reform Act. In 2012, the widely lauded Declaration of Internet Freedom was in response to, as the article puts it, “existing threats coming from growing industrial cartels and the stored-data marketplace.” The declaration “also pushed openness, innovation, and privacy as first principles.”

Then in 2022, after two years of lockdowns and unprecedented censorship, a raft of nations joined together to release a “Declaration for the Future of the Internet.” Aside from writing so abominable it serves as a textbook example of Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language,” this newest salvo proclaims a royal “We” throughout in a direct repudiation to Barlow’s declaration in 1996, which began,

Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.

That sentiment appears to be what this recent “Declaration” regards as a threat. The freedom of cyberspace has been replaced by the iron control of the powerful.

Where will the internet be in 5 years? In 10? What can we expect from future “declarations”? Having infiltrated almost every aspect of business, politics, education, religion, and social relations, digital technology has squeezed out off-grid thought and community in countless ways. It’s a formidable instrument of power and control.