I’ve commented before on the vision of the near-future I grew up with, reading Wired, Bruce Sterling, William Gibson, Neil Stephenson, et al. In my teenage years, I looked eagerly forward to the near future, when the vision of a Utopian cyberspace would become a reality, whether the institutions of the old century liked it or not. Of course, living as I do in the near-future, I know better. I know governments and the other powerful institutions of the last century are still here, and they control the cyberspace where the Utopia was supposed to be built.

Today I ran across another reminder of the starry-eyed idealism that ruled the geek class in the early-to-mid 90s. The Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace (don’t laugh!) was written by John Perry Barlow, one of the founders of the Electronic Frontier Foundation in Davos in 1996. At that point I was just getting used to in-home dial-up PPP Internet access, had not yet started my professional career, and the world seemed ripe for the coming of the third age of man; the Information Age.

It was going to be great. We’d have ubiquitous cryptography, so everyone would create and abandon digital identities to suit their needs with no chance of eavesdropping or surveillance. Governments and corporations would flail about, trying to restrict and control and regulate the flow of information, only to find that the borderless, formless world of cyberspace defied their antiquated legal regimes. There would be anonymous, private electronic cash upon which would be built a new economy, more varied and wonderful and free than any the world had ever seen. The anachronism of the nation-state would be relegated to the comparatively mundane task of managing meatspace, leaving the boundless creative genius of humanity to evolve and grow in the perfect liberty of cyberspace.

That, anyway, was the idea. I remember when the Communications Decency Act (CDA) was passed, I was living in Nebraska and barely had any access to the Internet. One of Nebraska’s senators was a co-sponsor of the bill, and I clearly recall regarding the law and the foolish gerontocrats who voted for it with pity more than contempt. What fools they must be, to think they can control the content of the Internet, “for the children” or for any reason. Didn’t they know that the new frontier defied regulation, censorship, oversight, and control? No matter; they’d soon find out as they fumbled about trying to enforce that which they could control.

The future, as we now know, didn’t turn out that way. Yes, there’s Google democratizing consumption of information, blogs democratizing the production of information, and YouTube democratizing video entertainment. It’s great that we have the powerful Information Age tools we do, but it’s a far cry from what it was supposed to be. I can’t receive, store, and spend money without surrendering my privacy to a bank required by law to gather and retain minute details of my identity. I can’t publish offensive or damaging information without government harassment or a DMCA takedown notice. I can’t layer hidden, undetectable cryptographic networks atop Internet traffic to avoid surveillance. I can’t buy or own property without registration and reporting. I certainly can’t take a commercial flight without submitting to searches and background checks by unaccountable government agents.

To be sure, alot of this utopian rhetoric was coming from crypto-anarchists and libertarians who latched on to cyberspace as their last best hope to realize their long-standing vision of a self-organizing ad-hoc society free of governments and corporations. Many of these people are now 9/11 truthers, Ron Paul supporters who chant “End the Fed” and hoarde gold for the coming economic collapse, and yes, some of them are even tax evaders and charlatans. Lover of liberty though I am, I’m no crypto-anarchist, I’m pretty sure 9/11 isn’t a Bush conspiracy, I think Ron Paul is a nut, and I pay my taxes (though not without considerable whining).

Nevertheless, I can’t help but feel pangs of regret when I run across old documents like the Hacker’s Manifesto and, yes, even the Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace. I wonder what might have been, or if we’ll ever really know. It’s almost enough to make me read old back issues of Wired. Almost.