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.
You may have missed that they're from the developing world, where menial labor is far less well paid and far more backbreaking and dangerous than in the US.
Korea is hardly the developing world, but they're from not-US, basically, which might as well be the developing world as far as the conversation is concerned.
Hmm, yeah I'm confused, they said "as a citizen of the third world" but then noted working in Korea and Japan.
Third world is historically outside the American (first world) and Soviet bloc (second world).
I don‘t think it‘s terribly relevant today, but why beat around the bush? Let‘s call it how we mean it:
Poor.
The point that is often misunderstood is this: Korea is a wealthy country, but that wealth is highly concentrated in Seoul. Once you leave Seoul, the quality of jobs often drops significantly.
Also why are we acting like Korean workers aren't actively being exploited upon? Long hours, no time off; hardly a society worth preserving unless you're an elite who disregards human life.
> Especially with the advent of AI, it feels like the time I had left to learn and actually build something has run out.
No, this is wrong.
Get your head down. Learn fundamentals. Practice and develop real skills. Ignore anyone saying this is irrelevant now. Let them talk, keep learning and building stuff, while using the new tools.
Give it a few years and you'll find the narrative has changed again, meanwhile you've got a few more years of experience under your belt. Avoid the noise and just focus on building.
This comment is AI, presumably AI translated
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.
Good writing! Thanks
> 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?
In poor countries like mine (and looks like GP's too), IT positions are very limited indeed. Nevertheless, it has been one of the very few sectors open to nobodies, helping us to pull ourselves out of poverty, open to those who weren't born to the right family with the right connections, or to a sugar daddy who can cover the first 25 years of our lives to go get a good education in Europe or the US.
Looks like it's being slowly taken away from us to make a few billionaires into proper trillionaires. Can't see this ending well for humanity.
And the common advice you hear on this site ("just migrate to country X") doesn't really apply to most of us. Even if you can name many examples of people doing just that, you're seeing a very narrow slice of the population; I can find many more counterexamples for each one of them.
Your weak passport won't impress anybody, almost all of the world is closed to you, you can't travel anywhere (forget migrate) without going through a lengthy and expensive process where you're treated with suspicion, and can be denied with no compensation, on every step of the way. I'm still talking about traveling here; finding work is much more difficult.
So it's really hard to move anywhere decent if you're not at the top of your profession, which in large part depends on your innate abilities, not just how many hours you put in.
I've become jaded and extremely cynical; if worst comes to worst, there's always one universal way out, which is what keeps me going for now.
Thank you for your encouragement, and I know it's sincere.
In a purely technical sense, if you have the resources, AI is an good tutor
I'm constantly astonished by it myself.
However, the difficult part about what you said is this
before AI, even relatively simple tasks carried a certain cost. But with the introduction of AI, that cost has actually gone up. And honestly, what shocked me when I first encountered AI was that the code it introduced was several orders of magnitude more impressive than anything I had access to in my environment.
Of course,
I'm not saying I was diligently studying open source code before that.
The environments where I primarily studied were centered around old books like Effective C++ or EIP.
My skills themselves were outdated, and the code I was commissioned to work on in Korea and Japan was also built on very lagcy technology. The kind where everything is crammed into a single PHP view, or where a WinForm application controls everything through one global singleton—essentially procedural programming and heavyweight coding.
But with the introduction of AI, surviving on these so-called legacy technologies suddenly became drastically more difficult. The problem was, most of the documentation I could access was this outdated. It's not that I delayed my studies, either. For instance, I knew Redis was released in 2009, but the first time I actually used it was in 2020. The gap between America and the non-American world is that vast.
So, learning modern coding techniques actually took quite a long time. Patterns like the event bus pattern, which I'm familiar with now, and other specific patterns. So I'm not denying your goodwill—as you said, I am taking on my own challenges.
It's just that AI has been a field of shock, making me realize just how narrow my world was and how terribly inadequate my coding skills are. And to close that skill gap, I'm reading HN.
To be fair, being from a small country can help too. (Hi from Lithuania.) It helps with marketing, because while it's difficult being Worlds Amazon, it's easier and more marketable to be lithuanian version.
Yes, it has downsides too, as economy and people resources work depending on scale - smaller community is going to be smaller - but it's a way to startup and build a base solution, while thinking of something else that may change the rest of the world later.
Of course, yeah, in the end it's just different...
P.S. I'm in same boat technology wise. It's difficult to learn everything, and learn it "on time" :)
We are both navigating a challenging road. I wish you all the best in your future endeavors, my friend.
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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.
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.
What? Go volunteer at a botanical garden or something.
Beautifully well said.
This was beautifully put. Lovely writing, and I agree; the current system is a recipe for anxiety.
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'm writing this from East Asia, not the US. Over here, there is a suffocating cultural expectation: if you aren't in a specific tier of jobs by a certain age, you are branded a loser. Furthermore, the economy is so heavily centralized that there are very few tech jobs outside of Seoul. I tried to make it there, but after being heavily scammed, I had no choice but to return to my rural hometown.
My English is also a constant work in progress. I depend on standard Google Translate for about 30~40% of what I communicate. For now, I'm making ends meet by doing Upwork job via an agency. It's an uphill battle, but I am determined to push myself to study more by reading English tech articles moving forward
Keep going and don’t listen to the noise.
Remember also that if you’re having an atypical experience you likely have a different perspective on the world, and what it needs, than others do. That different way of looking at things could turn out to be very valuable.
Good luck man, keep at it.. rooting for you! now that I am in my 50s and being passed over for tech jobs thanks to a bad market, ageism, AI fears etc and I had to build my own career again and dived into the startup world, its not been easy but keep looking at all your options.
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).
Evidence for 1992:
> After a disorienting visit from the FBI in May of 1990, I wrote a rant called Crime and Puzzlement, which led to my establishing with Mitch Kapor (who had previously founded Lotus Development Company) an organization called the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
> Now, after almost two years of operation...
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?
That's what I thought, too, but the top of the article says "For the Conference on HyperNetworking, Oita, Japan" which was in '94. So, I thought maybe "last summer" was internally even off by a couple years? I'm really not sure, but someone around these parts probably knows. Worth mentioning that also in the early 90s people did refer to the Russian Federation as the Soviet Union sometimes as a shortening of "the former Soviet Union".
The estimate of "The Internet" connecting 800,000 computers is probably also pretty surgically date-identifying (at least to isolate 1992 to 1998 given how fast it was growing at the time, though estimation error might cause a little trouble!). For example, https://web.mit.edu/people/mkgray/net/internet-growth-summar... also suggests 1994 (although that estimate was 0.6 million) while 1992 would be more like 200,000 although as per my scare quotes (and that MIT link) "The Internet" was also a somewhat vague term at the time. And by 1998 it was surely over 10 million which makes the @karel-3d quite likely incorrect, although who knows - maybe that's when the EFF first put it up on their web site?
EDIT: I mostly think it matters since observations that might have seemed quite prescient in 1992 (like also-Mormon Orson Scott Card's even more prescient ideas in 1985 Ender's Game with Locke & Demosthenes political chat personas based on 1980s BBS/UUCP network activity) were very much things everyone was saying by 1998.
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That shortly after the fall of the Soviet Union, it wouldn't surprise me if people still used the old name even if it isn't technically correct.
I just put the title to Google and pattern-matched 1998. I am sorry, as I was probably wrong, it seems it's earlier.
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 am unfamiliar with the history of the piece. Many things are possible. He may have "mostly wrote" it in 1992 and then "polished it" for a 1994 Oita conference, but was somewhat sloppy in internally updating everything date-dependent like the coup part. People also can be very flowery/metaphorical about using the word "coup". Not sure if they even have attendee/speaker lists online for those Oita conferences anymore, but that might also help if he wasn't at all of them. Bitrot / entropy can corrupt the digital world as well as the physical, just with more checksums if the referents still exist. ;-)
“Two years later [after the first conference in 1990], I was invited back, along with John Barlow […].”
“[…] which explains why I was invited to Oita in 1990, and why Barlow, Johansen, and Johnson-Lenz were invited to join me there in 1993.”
While 1992 vs. 1993 is still ambiguous (either 1993 is a typo, or the invitation was two-and-something years later), the text confirms that there was a second HyperNetwork conference in Oita in either 1992 or 1993, and that Barlow was invited to it.
“Will Japan Jack In?
For the October, 1992
Electronic Frontier column in Communications of the ACM
by John Perry Barlow […] At a conference on globally networked computing in Oita Prefecture in February, I was astonished to hear a number of Japanese corporate officials […] proclaim enthusiastically the potential of the "Hypernetwork"[…].”
This would imply that there was a Hypernetwork-related conference in Oita in February 1992 that Barlow attended.
Ah. Good searching! So, maybe the 800,000 computers was "in DNS but un-pingable IP hosts" (dial-up was a big then then) or maybe included non-IP "networked" hosts or who knows.. Anyway, I agree that your finds make it more likely to be 1992/3 than 1994. Thanks!
An incredible, lucid, and beautiful depiction of the burgeoning, inchoate world of cyberspace at the time — voicing an anxiety that echoes even louder today:
We humans would be liberated into an Elysian condition of permanent leisure. We’d have nothing to do but hang out in our indestructible miracle-fiber jumpsuits and talk philosophy.
Only it didn’t happen quite like that. The machines did get many of our physical jobs alright, but no one could quite figure out how to pay us for all that hanging out.
What would John make of what’s unfolded since? Much as he envisioned and embraced, humanity poured its imagination, creativity, toil, and love into cyberspace — only for the machines to feed on it all and usher in a new, all-encompassing level of human obsolescence.
> 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.
Wholeheartedly agree. As an American, I get SO tired of the "rugged American individual" narrative...
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?
Gen Z needs to chill on this expectation of unrelenting positivity. Or I guess y'all can just keep vaping to deal with the stress.
Not sure what Gen Z people you've met, but everyone I've met seemed depressed if anything to me. But also, don't really hang out with kids, so probably just the few I've met.
I don't care about it being positive or negative, but at least make it constructive and at least make it on topic instead of just spewing unrelated nonsense, but I guess it's hard for boomers to avoid posting their typical knee-jerk reactions publicly.
> I guess it's hard for boomers to avoid posting their typical knee-jerk reactions publicly.
I use the phrase "there's a boomer in every room," to describe the phenomenon. Always taking up space, never knowing when to shut up. Always working out a way to make it about him. I'd say it equally applies to post author and the person you responded to. There's no teaching them otherwise, complaining is pointless, hence my response.
> 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.
This piece was written over 30 years ago.
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.
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)
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.
There's no date in it. What it was written?
Masterclass in navel gazing
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Reminds me of Wendell Berry or even Cormac Mccarthy's writing. Great piece.
“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.
I think he is suggesting that this article is heavily exaggerated, or possibly written more as entrainment rather than to express fact. He quotes the misuse of rule of law to prove his point.
Up to you whether you agree. There are lots of examples in American past where mob mentality weighed more than law, so that example doesn't disprove the article for me but I hope it is entertainment instead of fact.
I’ve lived much of my life in the upper Midwest and have close relatives in Wyoming.
Nobody behaves like that. Ever.
The environment is harsh and people unfailingly help each other. Law and order is respected. The culture is one of independence, but rooted strongly in public good.
What the author wrote must surely have been an attempt at humor in the Patrick F. McManus vein.
(1998)
edit: so 1994
"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.
You may have missed that they're from the developing world, where menial labor is far less well paid and far more backbreaking and dangerous than in the US.
Korea is hardly the developing world, but they're from not-US, basically, which might as well be the developing world as far as the conversation is concerned.
Hmm, yeah I'm confused, they said "as a citizen of the third world" but then noted working in Korea and Japan.
Third world is historically outside the American (first world) and Soviet bloc (second world).
I don‘t think it‘s terribly relevant today, but why beat around the bush? Let‘s call it how we mean it:
Poor.
The point that is often misunderstood is this: Korea is a wealthy country, but that wealth is highly concentrated in Seoul. Once you leave Seoul, the quality of jobs often drops significantly.
Also why are we acting like Korean workers aren't actively being exploited upon? Long hours, no time off; hardly a society worth preserving unless you're an elite who disregards human life.
> Especially with the advent of AI, it feels like the time I had left to learn and actually build something has run out.
No, this is wrong.
Get your head down. Learn fundamentals. Practice and develop real skills. Ignore anyone saying this is irrelevant now. Let them talk, keep learning and building stuff, while using the new tools.
Give it a few years and you'll find the narrative has changed again, meanwhile you've got a few more years of experience under your belt. Avoid the noise and just focus on building.
This comment is AI, presumably AI translated
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.
Good writing! Thanks
> 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?
In poor countries like mine (and looks like GP's too), IT positions are very limited indeed. Nevertheless, it has been one of the very few sectors open to nobodies, helping us to pull ourselves out of poverty, open to those who weren't born to the right family with the right connections, or to a sugar daddy who can cover the first 25 years of our lives to go get a good education in Europe or the US.
Looks like it's being slowly taken away from us to make a few billionaires into proper trillionaires. Can't see this ending well for humanity.
And the common advice you hear on this site ("just migrate to country X") doesn't really apply to most of us. Even if you can name many examples of people doing just that, you're seeing a very narrow slice of the population; I can find many more counterexamples for each one of them.
Your weak passport won't impress anybody, almost all of the world is closed to you, you can't travel anywhere (forget migrate) without going through a lengthy and expensive process where you're treated with suspicion, and can be denied with no compensation, on every step of the way. I'm still talking about traveling here; finding work is much more difficult.
So it's really hard to move anywhere decent if you're not at the top of your profession, which in large part depends on your innate abilities, not just how many hours you put in.
I've become jaded and extremely cynical; if worst comes to worst, there's always one universal way out, which is what keeps me going for now.
Thank you for your encouragement, and I know it's sincere. In a purely technical sense, if you have the resources, AI is an good tutor I'm constantly astonished by it myself.
However, the difficult part about what you said is this before AI, even relatively simple tasks carried a certain cost. But with the introduction of AI, that cost has actually gone up. And honestly, what shocked me when I first encountered AI was that the code it introduced was several orders of magnitude more impressive than anything I had access to in my environment.
Of course, I'm not saying I was diligently studying open source code before that. The environments where I primarily studied were centered around old books like Effective C++ or EIP. My skills themselves were outdated, and the code I was commissioned to work on in Korea and Japan was also built on very lagcy technology. The kind where everything is crammed into a single PHP view, or where a WinForm application controls everything through one global singleton—essentially procedural programming and heavyweight coding.
But with the introduction of AI, surviving on these so-called legacy technologies suddenly became drastically more difficult. The problem was, most of the documentation I could access was this outdated. It's not that I delayed my studies, either. For instance, I knew Redis was released in 2009, but the first time I actually used it was in 2020. The gap between America and the non-American world is that vast.
So, learning modern coding techniques actually took quite a long time. Patterns like the event bus pattern, which I'm familiar with now, and other specific patterns. So I'm not denying your goodwill—as you said, I am taking on my own challenges.
It's just that AI has been a field of shock, making me realize just how narrow my world was and how terribly inadequate my coding skills are. And to close that skill gap, I'm reading HN.
To be fair, being from a small country can help too. (Hi from Lithuania.) It helps with marketing, because while it's difficult being Worlds Amazon, it's easier and more marketable to be lithuanian version.
Yes, it has downsides too, as economy and people resources work depending on scale - smaller community is going to be smaller - but it's a way to startup and build a base solution, while thinking of something else that may change the rest of the world later.
Of course, yeah, in the end it's just different...
P.S. I'm in same boat technology wise. It's difficult to learn everything, and learn it "on time" :)
We are both navigating a challenging road. I wish you all the best in your future endeavors, my friend.
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.
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.
What? Go volunteer at a botanical garden or something.
Beautifully well said.
This was beautifully put. Lovely writing, and I agree; the current system is a recipe for anxiety.
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'm writing this from East Asia, not the US. Over here, there is a suffocating cultural expectation: if you aren't in a specific tier of jobs by a certain age, you are branded a loser. Furthermore, the economy is so heavily centralized that there are very few tech jobs outside of Seoul. I tried to make it there, but after being heavily scammed, I had no choice but to return to my rural hometown.
My English is also a constant work in progress. I depend on standard Google Translate for about 30~40% of what I communicate. For now, I'm making ends meet by doing Upwork job via an agency. It's an uphill battle, but I am determined to push myself to study more by reading English tech articles moving forward
Keep going and don’t listen to the noise.
Remember also that if you’re having an atypical experience you likely have a different perspective on the world, and what it needs, than others do. That different way of looking at things could turn out to be very valuable.
Good luck man, keep at it.. rooting for you! now that I am in my 50s and being passed over for tech jobs thanks to a bad market, ageism, AI fears etc and I had to build my own career again and dived into the startup world, its not been easy but keep looking at all your options.
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).
Evidence for 1992:
> After a disorienting visit from the FBI in May of 1990, I wrote a rant called Crime and Puzzlement, which led to my establishing with Mitch Kapor (who had previously founded Lotus Development Company) an organization called the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
> Now, after almost two years of operation...
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?
That's what I thought, too, but the top of the article says "For the Conference on HyperNetworking, Oita, Japan" which was in '94. So, I thought maybe "last summer" was internally even off by a couple years? I'm really not sure, but someone around these parts probably knows. Worth mentioning that also in the early 90s people did refer to the Russian Federation as the Soviet Union sometimes as a shortening of "the former Soviet Union".
The estimate of "The Internet" connecting 800,000 computers is probably also pretty surgically date-identifying (at least to isolate 1992 to 1998 given how fast it was growing at the time, though estimation error might cause a little trouble!). For example, https://web.mit.edu/people/mkgray/net/internet-growth-summar... also suggests 1994 (although that estimate was 0.6 million) while 1992 would be more like 200,000 although as per my scare quotes (and that MIT link) "The Internet" was also a somewhat vague term at the time. And by 1998 it was surely over 10 million which makes the @karel-3d quite likely incorrect, although who knows - maybe that's when the EFF first put it up on their web site?
EDIT: I mostly think it matters since observations that might have seemed quite prescient in 1992 (like also-Mormon Orson Scott Card's even more prescient ideas in 1985 Ender's Game with Locke & Demosthenes political chat personas based on 1980s BBS/UUCP network activity) were very much things everyone was saying by 1998.
That shortly after the fall of the Soviet Union, it wouldn't surprise me if people still used the old name even if it isn't technically correct.
I just put the title to Google and pattern-matched 1998. I am sorry, as I was probably wrong, it seems it's earlier.
edit: earliest web archive crawl is from 1996
https://web.archive.org/web/19961220120042/https://www.eff.o...
so you are probably right with 1994
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 am unfamiliar with the history of the piece. Many things are possible. He may have "mostly wrote" it in 1992 and then "polished it" for a 1994 Oita conference, but was somewhat sloppy in internally updating everything date-dependent like the coup part. People also can be very flowery/metaphorical about using the word "coup". Not sure if they even have attendee/speaker lists online for those Oita conferences anymore, but that might also help if he wasn't at all of them. Bitrot / entropy can corrupt the digital world as well as the physical, just with more checksums if the referents still exist. ;-)
I found a source that confirms the 1992 or 1993 date: https://people.well.com/user/hlr/vcbook/vcbook7.html
“Two years later [after the first conference in 1990], I was invited back, along with John Barlow […].” “[…] which explains why I was invited to Oita in 1990, and why Barlow, Johansen, and Johnson-Lenz were invited to join me there in 1993.”
While 1992 vs. 1993 is still ambiguous (either 1993 is a typo, or the invitation was two-and-something years later), the text confirms that there was a second HyperNetwork conference in Oita in either 1992 or 1993, and that Barlow was invited to it.
EDIT: Another source: https://www.eff.org/pages/complete-acm-columns-collection
“Will Japan Jack In? For the October, 1992 Electronic Frontier column in Communications of the ACM by John Perry Barlow […] At a conference on globally networked computing in Oita Prefecture in February, I was astonished to hear a number of Japanese corporate officials […] proclaim enthusiastically the potential of the "Hypernetwork"[…].”
This would imply that there was a Hypernetwork-related conference in Oita in February 1992 that Barlow attended.
Ah. Good searching! So, maybe the 800,000 computers was "in DNS but un-pingable IP hosts" (dial-up was a big then then) or maybe included non-IP "networked" hosts or who knows.. Anyway, I agree that your finds make it more likely to be 1992/3 than 1994. Thanks!
An incredible, lucid, and beautiful depiction of the burgeoning, inchoate world of cyberspace at the time — voicing an anxiety that echoes even louder today:
What would John make of what’s unfolded since? Much as he envisioned and embraced, humanity poured its imagination, creativity, toil, and love into cyberspace — only for the machines to feed on it all and usher in a new, all-encompassing level of human obsolescence.> 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.
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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.
Wholeheartedly agree. As an American, I get SO tired of the "rugged American individual" narrative...
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?
Gen Z needs to chill on this expectation of unrelenting positivity. Or I guess y'all can just keep vaping to deal with the stress.
Not sure what Gen Z people you've met, but everyone I've met seemed depressed if anything to me. But also, don't really hang out with kids, so probably just the few I've met.
I don't care about it being positive or negative, but at least make it constructive and at least make it on topic instead of just spewing unrelated nonsense, but I guess it's hard for boomers to avoid posting their typical knee-jerk reactions publicly.
> I guess it's hard for boomers to avoid posting their typical knee-jerk reactions publicly.
I use the phrase "there's a boomer in every room," to describe the phenomenon. Always taking up space, never knowing when to shut up. Always working out a way to make it about him. I'd say it equally applies to post author and the person you responded to. There's no teaching them otherwise, complaining is pointless, hence my response.
> 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.
This piece was written over 30 years ago.
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.
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)
(1992)
(See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48136937.)
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.
There's no date in it. What it was written?
Masterclass in navel gazing
Reminds me of Wendell Berry or even Cormac Mccarthy's writing. Great piece.
“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.
I think he is suggesting that this article is heavily exaggerated, or possibly written more as entrainment rather than to express fact. He quotes the misuse of rule of law to prove his point.
Up to you whether you agree. There are lots of examples in American past where mob mentality weighed more than law, so that example doesn't disprove the article for me but I hope it is entertainment instead of fact.
I’ve lived much of my life in the upper Midwest and have close relatives in Wyoming.
Nobody behaves like that. Ever.
The environment is harsh and people unfailingly help each other. Law and order is respected. The culture is one of independence, but rooted strongly in public good.
What the author wrote must surely have been an attempt at humor in the Patrick F. McManus vein.
(1998)
edit: so 1994
"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."
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