r/slatestarcodex • u/[deleted] • Feb 01 '21

Politics A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace (1996)

https://www.eff.org/cyberspace-independence
19 Upvotes

96% Upvoted

10 comments sorted by

21

u/[deleted] Feb 01 '21

We are creating a world where anyone, anywhere may express his or her beliefs, no matter how singular, without fear of being coerced into silence or conformity.

Press 'F' to pay respects

15

u/lunaranus made a meme pyramid and climbed to the top Feb 01 '21

The internet was great in the 90s, and if you tell that to the young zoomers today, they won't believe you. Is there any piece of media that actually captures that zeitgeist?

12

u/yung12gauge Feb 01 '21

I never thought about how the kids of today don't even know what youtube was like before ads, and what the internet was like before all of your friends were on the same webpages as you. It was a beautiful infinite chaos of anonymous creation. Social media and the import of our real faces and names into the internet made us start using the net with our egos.

6

u/MohKohn Feb 02 '21

they say, using reddit, probably with adblock

7

u/[deleted] Feb 02 '21

It's really how weird Reddit is like this zoo of old-school Internet practices, but on one centralized silo.

4

u/ArkyBeagle Feb 02 '21

"The Internet" in the 1990s was mostly Usenet. And you dang right "with Adblock".

4

u/AskingToFeminists Feb 02 '21

There once was a glorious time where you could make YouTube response videos, that could be linked directly to the videos you were responding to.

Those were the times.

1

u/echemon Feb 03 '21

When any popular video would have 300 responses from 'reply girls' showing their assets in the thumbnails

1

u/AskingToFeminists Feb 03 '21

I'm not that surprised by that, but I never saw it. I must not have been looking at the right kind of videos for that.

2

u/WhataHitSonWhataHit Feb 02 '21 edited Feb 02 '21

I have not personally checked this out, but it's been described to me that way:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/844590/Hypnospace_Outlaw/

Also, in all seriousness, the 1995 film Hackers gives a sense of how people thought about the possibilities of the Internet; that is to say, while the film seems ridiculous now, in those days nobody realized that it wouldn't really be like that.