A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace (1996)
In some ways, we got this future. We wanted total freedom. We got total freedom.<p>&quot;No we don&#x27;t! What about Facebook and Google and and an...&quot;<p>...listen: Freedom means the ability to choose NOT to be free.<p>(This is the challenge that faces anarchists: How do you enforce freedom? It&#x27;s a contradiction in terms. I say this as someone who would desperately like to be wrong about this, but in all my years I&#x27;ve yet to see any resolution to that.)<p>We choose to use Google instead of Duck Duck Go. We choose to use Facebook instead of our own self-hosted blogs. We choose to reveal our identities online rather than use anonymous personas.<p>We choose all of this.<p>Yes, there&#x27;s an amount of privacy violation that is happening at the ISP level that allows an unconscionable amount of tracking, and that&#x27;s a fight worth fighting. But the vast majority of what we talk about when we discuss privacy is stuff that we chose.<p>We chose wrong, but we chose. We can still make better choices, but we don&#x27;t.<p>The conglomerates of the world are winning not because of force (no one pointed a gun at my head to join Facebook or install it on my phone), but because they offered us a nicer playground.<p>We had Second Life, where we could do and be anything we wanted. We chose Minecraft and Fortnite. We had free email servers that we could run on our machines. We chose Gmail. We had absurdly cheap storage devices that we could use to create our own &quot;cloud&quot; services to store all of our data ourselves, outside the reach of prying eyes or hands. We chose iCloud and Drive and AWS and Dropbox and all the rest.<p>Cyberspace IS independent and free, or at least as independent and free as its ever been. The reason we don&#x27;t feel that way is because we choose, every day, to participate in controlled wonder gardens. We prefer the convenience.