In “Traveler, Your (Digital) Footprints,” Chuer Yang ’27 explores various internet rabbit holes she’s tumbled down.
There is some soft gnawing hunger for novelty which centers the West of America. Here, at the edge of the world, we contemplate new stairways to new heavens.
As I was flipping through the Whole Earth Catalog supplement for the Fall ‘69 issue at Stanford’s Special Collections Archive, I came across “The Frontier Thesis” by historian Frederick Turner (he is not related at all to Professor Fred Turner in the Communications Department, I asked). Turner argues that westward expansion of the American frontier is the foundation of the country’s individualistic and democratic pillars, distinguishing it from the heavy institutions and hierarchies of its European peers.
A hum of urgency keeps the country’s foundational layers dynamic. And there is no place which exercises this tabula rasa mindset more than California. From the first Spanish settlers to the American pioneers, California’s character is defined by a persistent state of thirst for change. And when the digital age boomed, this pursuit of the frontier remained a critical throughline.
The dot-com bubble of the late 1990s to the early 2000s exponentially expanded the scope and magnitude of the internet global village. Cyberspace was theorized as a platonic arena of communication, action and human connection. But the informational asymmetry between the government and the private sector sparked controversies regarding free speech.
In the summer of 1990, Mitch Kapor, John Perry Barlow and John Gilmore founded the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit focused on the protection of online civil liberties. Kapor was the founding chair of the Mozilla Foundation, creator of Firefox, founder of Lotus 1-2-3 and Kapor Capital. Barlow was a lyricist for the Grateful Dead. Gilmore was the fifth employee at Sun Microsystems and co-authored the Bootstrap Protocol, which set the basis for assigning IP addresses to devices. In their minds, settlers resided under no particular jurisdiction amid the experimental ambiguity of the internet.
In 1996, Barlow put it succinctly in A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, a manifesto on the rights of individuals within cyberspace:
“Governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. You have neither solicited nor received ours. We did not invite you. You do not know us, nor do you know our world. Cyberspace does not lie within your borders. Do not think that you can build it, as though it were a public construction project. You cannot. It is an act of nature and it grows itself through our collective actions.”
Barlow’s proclamation is perhaps the original draft of effective accelerationism (e/acc). Building on the fringes of effective altruism (EA), e/acc seeks to innovate technology without any guardrails whatsoever. While the philosophy is certainly not as prolific as EA, it has gained a niche following, including pioneer of the web browser turned venture capitalist Marc Andreessen. Though the prospect of hyper-concentrated velocity is enticing — as we contemplate new stairways to new heavens — remember that the piper will not lead us to reason.
Eden is not guaranteed to be at the top of the innovation stairway; there is no use in constructing an escalator if we are merely striving for abstract perfect notions at the expense of the practical here and now. The lives of today are beautiful and precious, looking ahead while disregarding the past and present is peculiarly Icarian.
The winds of freedom will remain intense the higher we climb, and our legs will continue to precariously dangle over the conical pit. If we are not intentional about our technological endeavors and the principles that they are founded on, we may very well fall.