How John Perry Barlow views his internet manifesto on its 20th anniversary

TWENTY years ago today at the icy, elite gabfest of Davos, an unlikely prophet of the internet age issued an 844-word proclamation that governments “have no sovereignty” online.

With “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace”, John Perry Barlow, a web guru and Grateful Dead lyricist, inspired a generation of modem-wielding youth to view the internet as part of a timeless struggle between individual freedom and oppression by political and corporate forces. Yet his manifesto also elicited eye-rolling from some of the digital cognoscenti, who felt that the state had an essential role if the internet were to become a mainstream medium.

What is clear is that the internet Mr Barlow described in 1996 looks vastly different than the one that exists today. The number of internet users worldwide has grown exponentially and now represents about 40% of the global population (see chart). Then, English constituted the vast majority of content; today, it is just one language within a cacophony of tongues. Two decades ago users dialed up for bandwidth of around 30 kilobytes per second; now it is measured in gigabytes. At the same time, we’ve replaced the dominance of telecom operators with the dominance of web platforms like Google and Facebook.

So how does Mr Barlow look back upon his declaration? We posed that and other questions to him.

The Economist: What do you think you got especially right—or wrong?

JPB: I will stand by much of the document as written. I believe that it is still true that the governments of the physical world have found it very difficult to impose their will on cyberspace. Of course, they are as good as they ever were at imposing their will on people whose bodies they can lay a hand on, though it is increasingly easy, as it was then, to use technical means to make the physical location of those bodies difficult to determine.

Even when they do get someone cornered, like Chelsea Manning, or Julian Assange, or [Edward] Snowden, they’re not much good at shutting them up. Ed regularly does $50,000 speeches to big corporate audiences and is obviously able to speak very freely. Ditto Julian. And even ditto Chelsea Manning, who despite the fact that she’s serving a 35-year sentence, is still able to speak her mind to all who will listen.

People will sputter, but what about China, what about Silk Road [an online marketplace that sold drugs before being shut down in 2013], what about Kim Dotcom? Well, I believe that a close examination of Chinese censorship is a little more nuanced than the media here would have us believe and is mostly focused on preventing something like the Cultural Revolution. But the Chinese know that they can’t compete in a global marketplace if they don’t allow their best minds full contact with our best minds. Silk Road is already reassembling itself in the gloomier recesses of the dark web, and the arrest and persecution of Kim Dotcom was simply an illegal over-reach by the U.S. government. Yeah, they can enforce the rule of law online provided their ability to break it.

If you could rewrite the “Declaration” based on what you know today, how might you change it?

I probably wouldn’t have imitated the grandiloquent style of a notorious former slave holder. And I would have been a bit more humble about the “Citizens of Cyberspace” creating social contracts to deal with bad behavior online. The fact remains there is not much one can do about bad behavior online except to take faith that the vast majority of what goes on there is not bad behavior. Yeah, I hate spam, and viruses, and worms, and surveillance [by America's National Security Agency], but the fact remains that if you can censor one of these bad behaviors, you’ve endowed yourself with the ability to censor almost anything you don’t like online. This is not an ability I wish to extend to any existing government in the physical world. If we assert it, what’s to prevent Saudi Arabia from doing the same.

And I would make it more obviously clear that I knew that cyberspace was not sublimely removed from the physical world, with which it has exactly the same relationship that the mind has with the body: deeply interdependent but qualitatively different. I think that point often got lost.

Over the decades, it has been continuously fashionable to make a straw man of my declaration, to hoist it up as the sort of woolly-headed hippie nonsense you’d expect from techno-utopians like me. This is done largely by people who have never read it, or take a strong interest in believing that government is about to come stomping into town, there to “civilize cyberspace.

You've lived a storied set of lives in your single life, but oddly, when the tributes someday come, "Declaration" may be the lead paragraph. How does that make you feel?

I’m okay with that. It’s hardly the best thing I ever wrote and suffers many flaws, both cosmetic and substantive. But I’ll live with it. And die with it, I guess.