The hypocrisy of cyberlibertarianism

网络自由意志主义的虚伪

I like the Internet. I am old enough to remember the pre-Internet era and despite the younger generations pining for those simpler days, I was there. Paper maps were absolutely horrible, just you and a compass in your car on the side of the road in the middle of the night trying to figure out where you are and where you are going. 我喜欢互联网。我年纪够大，还记得互联网时代之前的生活。尽管年轻一代向往那些更简单的日子，但我可是亲历者。纸质地图简直糟糕透顶，你只能在深夜路边，拿着指南针，试图弄清楚自己身在何处、要去向何方。

Once when driving from Michigan to Florida I got so lost in the middle of the night in Kentucky that I had to pull over to sleep and wait for the sun so I could figure out where I was. I awoke to an old man staring unblinkingly into my car, shirtless, breathing heavy enough to fog the windows. To say I floored that 1991 Honda Civic is an understatement. 有一次，我从密歇根开车去佛罗里达，在肯塔基州的深夜里迷了路，不得不靠边停车睡觉，等天亮了才能辨别方向。醒来时，我发现一个没穿上衣的老人正目不转睛地盯着我的车，他呼吸沉重，把车窗都喷出了雾气。说我当时猛踩油门开走那辆1991年的本田思域，那都算是轻描淡写了。

You would leave your house and then just disappear. This is presented as kind of romantic now, as if we were just free spirits on the wind and could stop and really watch a sunset. In practice it was mostly an annoying game of attempting to guess where people were. You’d call their job, they had left. You’d call their house, they weren’t home yet. Presumably they were in transit but you actually had no idea. 那时你一旦出门，就彻底“失联”了。现在这被描绘得颇为浪漫，仿佛我们是随风飘荡的自由灵魂，可以随时停下来静静欣赏日落。但在现实中，这大多是一场令人恼火的猜谜游戏，试图推测别人在哪里。你打去公司，他们已经走了；打去家里，他们还没到。你只能推测他们在路上，但实际上你根本一无所知。

As a child my response to people asking me where my parents were was often a shrug as I resumed attempting to eat my weight in shoplifted candy or make homemade napalm with gasoline and styrofoam. Sometimes I shudder as a parent remembering how young I was putting pennies on train tracks and hiding dangerously close so that we could get the cool squished penny afterwards. 小时候，当别人问我父母在哪时，我通常耸耸肩，然后继续去吃我偷来的、重得像我体重的糖果，或者用汽油和泡沫塑料自制凝固汽油弹。有时作为父母，回想起自己当年在铁轨上放硬币，还躲在危险的近处等着捡那些被压扁的“酷硬币”，我不禁感到战栗。

Cassettes are the worst way to listen to music ever invented. Tapes squealed. Tapes slowed down for no reason, like they were depressed. Multiple times in my life I would set off on a long road trip, pop in a tape, and within fifteen minutes watch as it shot from the deck unspooled like the guts from the tauntaun in Star Wars. You’d then spend forty-five minutes at a Sunoco trying to wind it back in with a Bic pen knowing in your heart you were performing CPR on a corpse. Then you’d put it back in the player out of pure stubbornness, and it would chew itself again immediately, and you’d drive the next six hours in silence with your own thoughts, which were not as good as Pearl Jam. 磁带是人类发明过的最糟糕的听歌方式。磁带会尖叫，会无缘无故地变慢，就像抑郁了一样。我人生中多次在长途旅行中塞进一盘磁带，结果不到十五分钟，它就从卡座里喷涌而出，像《星球大战》里塔恩塔兽的内脏一样散落一地。你得在Sunoco加油站花上四十五分钟，用一支圆珠笔试图把它卷回去，心里却清楚自己是在给一具尸体做心肺复苏。出于纯粹的固执，你把它塞回播放器，它立刻又会把自己绞烂，于是你只能在接下来的六个小时里沉默地面对自己的思绪——而这些思绪可远不如珍珠果酱乐队（Pearl Jam）的音乐动听。

So I am, mostly, grateful for the bounty the internet has provided. But there is something wrong, deeply wrong, with what we built. The wrongness was there at the start. It was baked into the foundation by people who told themselves a story about freedom, and that story was a lie, and we are all, every one of us, paying their tab. 所以，我大体上是感激互联网所带来的馈赠的。但我们所构建的东西出了问题，而且是深层次的问题。这种错误从一开始就存在。它被那些编造自由故事的人植入到了地基之中，而那个故事是个谎言，我们所有人，每一个个体，都在为他们的账单买单。

To understand what happened we need to go back to the 90s. A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace. One of the first and most classic examples of the ideology that powered and continues to power tech is the classic “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace” by John Perry Barlow written in 1996. You can find the full text here. I remember thinking it was genius when I first read it. I was young enough that I also thought “Snow Crash” was a serious political document. Today the Declaration reads like one of those sovereign citizen TikToks where someone in traffic court is claiming diplomatic immunity under maritime law. 要理解发生了什么，我们需要回到90年代。《赛博空间独立宣言》。驱动并持续驱动科技界的一种意识形态，其最早、最经典的例子之一，就是约翰·佩里·巴洛（John Perry Barlow）在1996年撰写的《赛博空间独立宣言》。你可以在这里找到全文。我记得第一次读到它时，觉得它简直是天才之作。那时我太年轻，甚至还觉得《雪崩》（Snow Crash）是一份严肃的政治文献。今天再看这份《宣言》，它读起来就像那些“主权公民”的TikTok视频，视频里的人在交通法庭上声称自己享有海事法下的外交豁免权。

It helps to know who Barlow was. Barlow was a Grateful Dead lyricist. He was also a Wyoming cattle rancher. He was also, briefly, the campaign manager for Dick Cheney’s first run for Congress. (You did not misread that.) He spent his later years as a fixture at Davos, the World Economic Forum, where the very wealthy gather each January to remind each other that they are interesting. It was at Davos, in February 1996, fueled by champagne and grievance over the Telecommunications Act, that Barlow banged out the Declaration on a laptop and emailed it to a few hundred friends. From there it became, somehow, one of the founding documents of the modern internet. 了解巴洛是谁很有帮助。巴洛是“感恩而死”乐队（Grateful Dead）的作词人，也是怀俄明州的牧牛人。他还曾短暂担任过迪克·切尼（Dick Cheney）首次竞选国会议员时的竞选经理。（你没看错。）他晚年是达沃斯世界经济论坛的常客，每年一月，超级富豪们聚集在那里，互相提醒对方自己是多么有趣。1996年2月，在达沃斯，伴着香槟和对《电信法》的不满，巴洛在笔记本电脑上敲出了这份《宣言》，并将其通过电子邮件发给了几百位朋友。从那时起，它不知何故成为了现代互联网的奠基文件之一。

“These increasingly hostile and colonial measures place us in the same position as those previous lovers of freedom and self-determination who had to reject the authorities of distant, uninformed powers. We must declare our virtual selves immune to your sovereignty, even as we continue to consent to your rule over our bodies. We will spread ourselves across the Planet so that no one can arrest our thoughts.” “这些日益敌对和殖民主义的措施，使我们处于与那些曾经热爱自由和自决的人们相同的境地，他们不得不拒绝遥远且无知的权力的统治。我们必须宣布我们的虚拟自我不受你们主权的管辖，即使我们继续同意你们对我们肉体的统治。我们将把自己散布到整个星球，这样就没人能逮捕我们的思想。”

Many of the pillars of “modern Internet” are here. Identity isn’t a fixed concept based on government ID but is a more fluid concept. We don’t need centralized control or really any form of control because those things are unnecessary. It was this and the famous earlier “Cyberspace and the American Dream: A Magna Carta for the Knowledge Age” that laid a familiar foundation for a lot of the culture we now have. “现代互联网”的许多支柱都在这里。身份不再是基于政府身份证件的固定概念，而是一个更具流动性的概念。我们不需要中央控制，甚至不需要任何形式的控制，因为这些都是多余的。正是这份宣言，以及更早前著名的《赛博空间与美国梦：知识时代的《大宪章》》，为我们现在拥有的许多文化奠定了熟悉的基础。

The Magna Carta is also our introduction to the (now familiar) creed of “catch up or get left behind”. The adoption of new technology must be done at the absolute fastest speed possible with no regulations or checks. You don’t need to worry about the consequences of technology because these problems correct themselves. If you told me the following was written two weeks ago by OpenAI I would have believed you. “If this analysis is correct, copyright and patent protection of knowledge (or at least many forms of it) may no longer be unnecessary. In fact, the marketplace may already be creating vehicles to compensate creators of customized knowledge outside the cumbersome copyright/patent process.” 这份《大宪章》也向我们介绍了（现在已广为人知的）“不进则退”的信条。新技术的采用必须以尽可能最快的速度进行，且不能有任何监管或审查。你不需要担心技术的后果，因为这些问题会自我修正。如果你告诉我下面这段话是OpenAI两周前写的，我也会相信：“如果这一分析是正确的，那么知识的版权和专利保护（至少是其中的许多形式）可能不再是必要的。事实上，市场可能已经在创造一些机制，在繁琐的版权/专利流程之外补偿定制知识的创作者。”

The cumbersome copyright/patent process. Cumbersome to whom, exactly? This is always the move. The thing your industry would prefer not to deal with is reframed as an obsolete burden. Your refusal to do it is rebranded as innovation. Your inability to imagine a world where you don’t get exactly what you want becomes a manifesto. 繁琐的版权/专利流程。到底对谁繁琐？这永远是他们的套路。你们行业不想处理的事情，被重新定义为过时的负担。你们拒绝执行的行为，被重新包装为创新。你们无法想象一个不能随心所欲的世界，于是将其变成了一份宣言。

Winner Saw It Coming 赢家早已预见

So there are dozens of these pieces and they all read the same. If you don’t regulate these technologies humanity will only benefit. Education, healthcare, industry, etc. We don’t need regulations because the transformation from the medium of paper to digital has transformed the human spirit. But one was extremely surpris… 所以，这类文章有几十篇，读起来都如出一辙。如果你不对这些技术进行监管，人类只会受益。教育、医疗、工业等等。我们不需要监管，因为从纸质媒介到数字媒介的转变已经改变了人类的精神。但其中一篇极其令人惊讶……