Many many years ago, in 1996 (the village elder might still remember those days) John Perry Barlow wrote the “Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace“, a document widely regarded by the digital elite as foundation for all things Internet.

The document declared the independence of the newly found cyberspace from the physical world, its governments, restrictions, rules and regulations. The thoughts it presented still serve as the groundwork for many articles and essays on how the Internet actually is and what it all means.

Whenever we come to a page that is unwilling to present its content to us based on the geographical location of our Internet connection we feel the weird mismatch of the rules of the physical world with all its long distances and borders and the digital space that allows 0s and 1s to flow freely in almost no time. It becomes obvious how broken the rules are and how the cyberspace should work differently. Funnily that impression is also wrong.

The independence of the Cyberspace was embraced with such enthusiasm for two very simple reasons

The rules that had annoyed us in the physical world annoyed us here as well (I just remind the older ones among you of the Japan Edition CDs of the 90s and 00s) The people who thought like us were online and the others weren’t.

Cyberspace was full of intelligent, skilled individuals, creative people, artists, hackers, scientists. So basically the antithesis of the consumerist crowd that many have grown to look down upon. With that group of people everything seemed possible, utopias that never were possible seemed to be just around the corner. An era of supermen and -women was about to approach, the singularity was a matter of months if not weeks.

Obviously things didn’t turn out that way.

Just as with every advancement before it, whether it was reading, writing, the theater or jazz clubs, the mainstream at some point assimilated it. When basically every day brought a new load of AOL CDs into our inboxes we should have realized that the – very elitist – utopia was no longer gonna happen.

Now this is not a text to mourn this potential Disneyland for the self-important ar(t)istocracy. This is a text to not just welcome the mainstream online but also accept the unbreakable ties connecting cyberspace and the physical world.

A few years ago, a prosecutor in the piratebay case asked Peter Sunde when he had first met his piratebay coworkers “in real life” on which Peter answered: “We don’t like the expression ‘In Real Life‘.

We say ‘Away From keyboard‘. We think that the Internet is real.”

Peter is absolutely right. The Internet is real. The physical world is real as well. Pretending that these two different facets of reality were disconnected in spite of us connecting them just by our pure existence seems silly it best and schizophrenic at worst.

Things seemed very disconnected for a while, when the Internet was just a bunch of Newsgroups, IRC Channels and Websites with animated GIFs saying “Email me”. But look around you.

Half the appliances in the room I am writing this in are in some way connected to the Internet. Your plants have twitter accounts these days telling the world when water is needed. We’ve put virtual layers of data right into our physical world connecting us over far distances while still mapping us on this ball of dust tumbling through space. Your smartphone does not just gather the news about the latest global crises and the latest meme about monkeys wearing eyepatches but is also highly aware of your whereabouts and tries to serve you getting the most out of your physical environment if just by warning you not to eat at that nice looking restaurant if you don’t want to upset your delicate stomach.

The Internet doesn’t run on ideas and the ether, it’s running on metal and cables made of copper and fiber. Just as we are (for now) tied to these meaty bodies the Internet is trapped in datacenters. It is a different perspective on reality, it allows different ways of communication, some wonderful and some horrible (web forums I am looking at you!), it exponentially enhances our potential as creative human beings just as it also provides an almost limitless stream of videos of kittens.

Cyberspace depends on the physical world just as the physical world no longer properly works without the Internet (or what do you think will happen if the Internet wouldn’t provide the means to track and direct packages of goods from one end of the planet to the other within days?). Cyberspace and the physical world are intertwined and it’s about time to stop treating them as if they were enemies.

Admittedly, the Internet has shown us many rules to be stupid. But they are not just stupid in the Internet: They are just generally stupid. They need fixing but not just on the Internet but generally.

Nowadays the singularity seems further away that in 1996 when the Declaration of Independence was written. But that’s OK. We’ve lost our little circle of people knowing the secret handshake. But we’ve won the potential to take so many people with us, showing them the things we’ve explored before they were there, the endless possibilities.

I’ve never believed in the Internet as the salvation of the elite few. By embracing the deep and inseparable connection of Cyberspace and the physical world we can build a better world for everyone. And that’s what it’s all about, isn’t it?

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