
The Original Sin of Internet Culture - DyslexicAtheist
https://thefrailestthing.com/2018/10/28/the-original-sin-of-internet-culture/
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KozmoNau7
The original sin of Internet Culture is also the original sin of all nerd/geek
culture. Because we generally skew towards introversion and have a hard time
making/keeping friends, we are very bad at excluding people. The very thing
that makes the world of geeks and nerds welcoming to quirky and odd
characters, is also the thing that allows damaging and objectively terrible
people to hang around. We're afraid of being confrontational and bad at
kicking out the people who damage our cohesion and communities.

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starbeast
I will post it if I find it, but there was a usenet post in the '90s that I
think nailed a different original sin. That of commodification and repackaging
of social interactions as a form of entertainment.

Long before our current social networks, it was already being noted that there
was something deeply awry in selling access to other people's recorded
conversations.

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geoah
"On the internet nobody knows you're a Dog".

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Internet,_nobody_know...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Internet,_nobody_knows_you're_a_dog)

~~~
starbeast
These days, they know that you are a dalmatian whippet cross, the exact time
when you last went for walkies and the colour, texture and shape of your
favourite chew toy.

------
hprotagonist
[https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/19](https://www.penny-
arcade.com/comic/2004/03/19)

The John Gabriel Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory (2004)

------
bni
Who where the ones making these claims that the internet would be some kind of
utopian world?

~~~
starbeast
"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.

We have no elected government, nor are we likely to have one, so I address you
with no greater authority than that with which liberty itself always speaks. I
declare the global social space we are building to be naturally independent of
the tyrannies you seek to impose on us. You have no moral right to rule us nor
do you possess any methods of enforcement we have true reason to fear.

Governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. You
have neither solicited nor received ours. We did not invite you. You do not
know us, nor do you know our world. Cyberspace does not lie within your
borders. Do not think that you can build it, as though it were a public
construction project. You cannot. It is an act of nature and it grows itself
through our collective actions.

You have not engaged in our great and gathering conversation, nor did you
create the wealth of our marketplaces. You do not know our culture, our
ethics, or the unwritten codes that already provide our society more order
than could be obtained by any of your impositions.

You claim there are problems among us that you need to solve. You use this
claim as an excuse to invade our precincts. Many of these problems don't
exist. Where there are real conflicts, where there are wrongs, we will
identify them and address them by our means. We are forming our own Social
Contract. This governance will arise according to the conditions of our world,
not yours. Our world is different.

Cyberspace consists of transactions, relationships, and thought itself,
arrayed like a standing wave in the web of our communications. Ours is a world
that is both everywhere and nowhere, but it is not where bodies live.

We are creating a world that all may enter without privilege or prejudice
accorded by race, economic power, military force, or station of birth.

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.

Your legal concepts of property, expression, identity, movement, and context
do not apply to us. They are all based on matter, and there is no matter here.

Our identities have no bodies, so, unlike you, we cannot obtain order by
physical coercion. We believe that from ethics, enlightened self-interest, and
the commonweal, our governance will emerge. Our identities may be distributed
across many of your jurisdictions. The only law that all our constituent
cultures would generally recognize is the Golden Rule. We hope we will be able
to build our particular solutions on that basis. But we cannot accept the
solutions you are attempting to impose.

In the United States, you have today created a law, the Telecommunications
Reform Act, which repudiates your own Constitution and insults the dreams of
Jefferson, Washington, Mill, Madison, DeToqueville, and Brandeis. These dreams
must now be born anew in us.

You are terrified of your own children, since they are natives in a world
where you will always be immigrants. Because you fear them, you entrust your
bureaucracies with the parental responsibilities you are too cowardly to
confront yourselves. In our world, all the sentiments and expressions of
humanity, from the debasing to the angelic, are parts of a seamless whole, the
global conversation of bits. We cannot separate the air that chokes from the
air upon which wings beat.

In China, Germany, France, Russia, Singapore, Italy and the United States, you
are trying to ward off the virus of liberty by erecting guard posts at the
frontiers of Cyberspace. These may keep out the contagion for a small time,
but they will not work in a world that will soon be blanketed in bit-bearing
media.

Your increasingly obsolete information industries would perpetuate themselves
by proposing laws, in America and elsewhere, that claim to own speech itself
throughout the world. These laws would declare ideas to be another industrial
product, no more noble than pig iron. In our world, whatever the human mind
may create can be reproduced and distributed infinitely at no cost. The global
conveyance of thought no longer requires your factories to accomplish.

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.

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."

John Perry Barlow - February 8, 1996

