In 1996, during the earliest days of the internet, a self-proclaimed cyberlibertarian named John Perry Barlow published a 16-paragraph essay called “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace.” It began with a bold plea: “On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone.” Barlow envisioned the internet almost as a new nation-state, a digital utopia free from the imperialistic hierarchies and rules of the physical world. He proudly proclaimed that “we are creating a world that all may enter without privilege or prejudice accorded by race, economic power, military force or station of birth” — a place where, he continued, “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.”

The document, meant to rouse support against new legislation that would increase government regulation of the web, quickly became adopted as a manifesto. Tens of thousands of websites hosted copies of the statement, at a time when there were only about a few hundred thousand websites in existence. Barlow modeled his vision for the internet after the ideas of Thomas Jefferson and the American Declaration of Independence. But as with the principles advanced by the founding fathers, there were inherent contradictions in the vision of equality and liberty it set forth: It assumed that humans, as disembodied entities online (or cyborgs), would miraculously shed their assumptions and biases about class, gender and privilege.

As we now know, cyberspace did not liberate human society from pre-existing socioeconomic hierarchies and power structures. In some instances, it may have even made them worse. “The historical significance of these ideas cannot be ignored,” Jack Goldsmith and Tim Wu write in their 2006 book, “Who Controls the Internet? Illusions of a Borderless World.” “They had an enormous impact on internet writers and thinkers, firms and even the U.S. Supreme Court — an influence that is still with us today.”

The web’s earliest architects and pioneers fought for their vision of freedom on the internet at a time when it was still small forums for conversation and text-based gaming. They thought the web could be adequately governed by its users without their needing to empower anyone to police it. The web’s founders underestimated — or perhaps overestimated — what would happen as the internet grew. It became an unwieldy place where guidelines were an afterthought, and in the process, gave rise to some of the worst behavior the offline world had to offer but with greater efficiency and scale. A 2014 study by the Pew Research Center found that 40 percent of adult internet users have dealt with online harassment. And those numbers go up among young adults (especially women) and nonwhite users. Women are significantly more likely than men to report being stalked or sexually harassed on the internet, and 51 percent of African-Americans and 54 percent of Hispanics said they had experienced harassment, compared with 34 percent of whites. And these numbers are from before last November’s election; since then, online vitriol has seemingly been on the upswing. The spike in sexist and racist remarks in all my feeds has been so unnerving and surprising that I reached out to several academics and software designers to better understand why this issue is still so pervasive in 2017.