"Governments of the Industrial World," the Declaration began, "you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather."

It was February 9, 1996, and Grateful Dead lyricist John Perry Barlow sat at his computer in Davos, Switzerland, fuming. Just days earlier, Congress had passed the mammoth Telecommunications Act. The bill revolutionized Federal telecom policy in about a dozen areas, but what made headlines was a subsection of the law called the Communications Decency Act. The CDA stipulated that anyone who "knowingly" used an interactive computer service to display to someone under 18 any kind of message or image that, "in context, depicts or describes, in terms patently offensive as measured by contemporary community standards, sexual or excretory activities or organs, regardless of whether the user of such service placed the call or initiated the communication" could receive a two year federal prison sentence or a hefty fine.

The bottom line, as Barlow noted, was that under the CDA, posting a frank discussion about abortion or typing out a generic dirty word on a webpage could get you time in the slammer.

"Well, fuck them," he wrote to his friends. "Or, more to the point, let us now take our leave of them. They have declared war on Cyberspace. Let us show them how cunning, baffling, and powerful we can be in our own defense." And so, to rally the troops, Barlow, co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, posted his famous Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace. He declared the "global social space we are building" to be "naturally independent of the tyrannies" governments seek to impose.

Furthermore: "You have no moral right to rule us nor do you possess any methods of enforcement we have true reason to fear," Barlow advised the United States of America. Why? Because . . .

"Cyberspace consists of transactions, relationships, and thought itself, arrayed like a standing wave in the web of our communications. Ours is a world that is both everywhere and nowhere, but it is not where bodies live. We are creating a world that all may enter without privilege or prejudice accorded by race, economic power, military force, or station of birth. We are creating a world where anyone, anywhere may express his or her beliefs, no matter how singular, without fear of being coerced into silence or conformity. Your legal concepts of property, expression, identity, movement, and context do not apply to us. They are based on matter, There is no matter here."

Woah.

Third Eyes

The mid-1990s were special years in the history of the Internet. The browser Netscape and the search engine Yahoo! dramatically redefined the possible. DSL and Cable modem service turbo-charged consumer access. But those are the miracles that we remember (along with initial public offerings that tripled in price in a day). What we tend to forget was the sheer utopianness of the moment; the amazing expectations that so many people had for cyberspace—that it would release us from the shackles of government and identity, that it would dissolve inequalities, and that it would foster global connectivity and end war.

Those were the days when the head of MIT's Media Lab could tell a technology conference that the Internet was the key to world peace—that twenty years from then (1997), children who explored the nature of other countries through cyberspace "are not going to know what nationalism is." Back then you could write a book like Jeff Zaleski's The Soul of Cyberspace, which included an interview with Virtual Reality Markup Language (VRML) pioneer Mark Pesce.

"My own theory is that the planet has chakras, as well as human beings," Pesce told Zaleski, "and that the planetary body is actualizing those chakras. I am pretty sure that the World Wide Web is the physical manifestation, the activation, of Ajna chakra. The Third Eye." Chakras, for the uninitiated to various strains of Buddhist and Hindu thought, are energy fields that emanate from the base of your spine. The Ajna, or "Third Eye" Chakra, is the closest we get to disembodied telepathic connectivity to others, the doctrine goes, preparing us for collective contact with the Crown Chakra, the link to the Divine.

"Cyberspace is a mirror that gets held up to the third eye," Pesce elaborated in a 1997 interview. "And the third eye, ajna chakra, is the light that removes illusion. It shows things as they are. And so this removal of boundaries, or refiguring of boundaries, that we're seeing is showing the world perhaps more clearly. I think we're in a powerful state of coming together."

But you didn't have to hang out at an ashram to subscribe to the idea that cyberspace would collectively release us from the shackles of the body or national identity. All the rage were books like Sherry Turkle's The Second Self and Life on the Screen. The story of the Internet, Turkle explained, was the story of a "culture of simulation," in which we "assume personae of our own creation." Thus, cyberspace was "eroding boundaries between the real and the virtual, the animate and inanimate, the unitary and multiple self."

"In the real-time communities of cyberspace," Turkle continued, "we are dwellers on the threshold between the real and the virtual, unsure of our footing, inventing ourselves as we go along." This was all new, these visionaries proclaimed. Nothing like it had ever happened before. And with it came radically egalitarian implications.