Context In Computing — Are There Bodies In Cyberspace?

“In 1996, John Perry Barlow, founder of the EFF, published his soon-to-be famous Declaration on the Independence of Cyberspace. In it, he insists that “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.” Using the readings, write a 400–500 word response to the central idea in Barlow’s declaration. Things to cover: do you agree with the idea that he expresses, and the idea that it is a myth? If so, where else in the world do you see the same sentiments articulated? How do the various readings complicate Barlow’s claim, and how are they in conversation with one another? You don’t have to bring up every reading, but you should weave a few in conversation with each other. Focus on those that stand out to you the most, and that you think are the strongest.”

I’m deeply envious of John Perry Barlow’s untroubled mind when it comes to cyberspace. Given that I was five years old when he declared that the internet was a place free of bodies, where any person could exist free of coercion, privilege, prejudice, and so on, I don’t think I’ll ever have the chance to see the internet as he saw it. This is probably for the best, but it would be nice to see the internet as a good, free place for a little while.

Obviously, cyberspace today isn’t what Barlow thought it was. It never was. From its beginning, cyberspace has been rooted in the physical, and in what Johanna Drucker calls the distributed materiality of physical systems — the complex set of interdependencies around them. The ignorance of this fact in the early days of the internet, predictably, have led to some of the worst implications of its creation in the physical. As Kashmir Hill points out, the thoughtless implementation of IP address mapping in its earliest days have led to horrifying implications in the real world: doxxing, threats, and more towards people whose only crime was existing within a rounding error of the center of the United States. Similarly, the internet’s dependency on its material substrates — the minerals that make up the circuits that make up the physical systems that allow for computation — has always had real-world implications. Given that many of these minerals originate in sub-Saharan Africa, and that demand for them has only grown since Barlow wrote his declaration, the interplay of demand and existent political structures (or lack thereof) in the region has led to untold suffering for thousands of miners and their families as the whims of the international community and various militias have dictated their lives and livelihoods. These material substrates have even, since Barlow wrote, become a major contributor to the ongoing climate crisis: between the massive server farms that allow for “cloud” computing (a euphemism that intentionally reinforces the idea of computing as something existing outside the physical, or at least outside the grounded) and the huge power demands of industrial-scale cryptocurrency mining rigs, computing has a very real demand on the energy grid and effect on the environment.

Even if we pretend that cyberspace is not rooted in, affected by and affecting the physical world, Barlow’s declaration is hilariously wrong even on its own terms. Within current-day cyberspace, our bodies still determine who we are. Your race, gender, nationality, and location are all quantified and digitized to serve you the most optimal experience for the firms that mediate your internet experience. As Latanya Sweeney’s research shows, ads served based on namesearch vary based on the likelihood of the name belonging to a race — predictably, black names have a higher likelihood of association with arrest. Similarly, the algorithmic citizenship project shows the variance in your internet experience based on your predicted nationality as determined by your internet behavior. This can have very real effects, from limits on what you can access online to whether or not the NSA has the right to read your communications. One of the more dystopian facts I discovered from them is that they assign an American-ness score to browsing behavior, and if yours drops below 50% they can legally record yours— you’re no longer an American citizen, at least online.

Cyberspace is not the free, unbiased, non-physical world Barlow thought it was. At its best, it still has the potential to liberate us from the limitations of our physical lives. In practice, though, it more often than not simply serves to weaponize existing prejudices and structures of oppression. We can be served surveillance, racism, exploitation, and cruelty at 11Mbps, while somewhere else in the world children as young as six dig out the tungsten so our next computer can do it even faster.