Your legal concepts of property, expression, identity, movement, and context do not apply to us. They are all based on matter, and there is no matter here.
Our identities have no bodies, so, unlike you, we cannot obtain order by physical coercion. We believe that from ethics, enlightened self-interest, and the commonweal, our governance will emerge. –“A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace”, John Perry Barlow, 8 February 1996
I come from the future with some disappointing news for the civilisation of the Mind. The Governments of the Industrial World continued to control the infrastructure that made your society possible. Your Cyberspace’s existence relied on the “weary giants of flesh and steel” you derided, and that dependence persists.
The “information industries” that you correctly identified as “increasingly obsolete” became so weak that facts are less tangible than a scent. A light breeze could disperse them, but it was with a massive wind that a new fascism rose, elevated on a platform of misinformation that is seemingly impossible to dismantle.
Your ideals led to creation of new currencies that could only be traded in your Cyberspace, that could also only be minted using the processing power of the physical world. Real fossil fuels were spent and real pollution accumulated. The generation of this currency contributed real harm to the world, which is now seeing shifts in global temperatures that may lead to a chain of extinctions and another set of crises.
You persisted in your patterns of idealism when the only thing that could have protected us was a healthy cynicism. You were so focused on your imaginary future, you failed to see the one that was already establishing itself.
You fucked up. But you also contributed to the development of a society in which deniability is rewarded and accountability is punished. So even though you fucked up, you can continue to feel good about yourselves by pretending that you didn’t.
But many of us living in your future want to make it unequivocally clear: YOU FUCKED UP.
Don’t blame us for resenting you.