skip to main bit
a man slumped on his desk, from 'The Sleep of Reason Produces
      Monsters'

Oblomovka

Currently:

Archive for February 8th, 2016

2016-02-08

Interdependence Day

I don’t what I was doing when Barlow’s Declaration came out. Looking now through some internal landmarks to orientate myself, I think I must have joined the exodus from Wired UK to Virgin Net a couple of months before its February 1996 dateline. The Wired UK essay was sent out a year, less a day, from the Declaration.

I wouldn’t be surprised if I missed it entirely. I don’t think I was hugely enamoured with West Coast techno-utopianism during this period.

What’s surprising, after placing it in the chronology, is how late that date feels. EFF had been around for six years; Wired magazine for three years, the Web for two years or so. The Californian Ideology, probably the most prominent critique of Barlow’s Jeffersonian framing, came out months before it did, in the Autumn of 1995.

It’s also worth digging around to see what the contemporary critiques of the Declaration were. At the time, I remember them as being pretty shoddy: not in terms of the points they made (which were significant, but largely obvious), but in their rhetorical heft. Zeitgeist doesn’t mean everyone thinks the same at the same time; it means that some ideas obtain a velocity that their critics, fighting headwinds, can only dream of achieving.

I wish I could understand more of this German one, awesomely named Die Anti-Barlow. The formatting obscures whether its conclusion is supposed to be a quote from John Perry, or another English-speaker, but it hangs in the air:

“Dominate culture today and you control the laws in 15 years.”

Five years on!

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           

petit disclaimer:
My employer has enough opinions of its own, without having to have mine too.