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  jdw64
  Reading this essay brought tears to my eyes.To me, the physical world is a realm permitted only to those with wealth. The author beautifully romanticizes the evaporation of tangible labor, but the physical labor I actually experienced meant unpaid, stolen wages. It meant working through the night, dozing off on the early morning subway until the very last stop, and enduring endless contempt, humiliation, and the toxic community that came with it.I sought a new community in cyberspace, and the world claims that this space rewards you. But looking at it now, that structure also seems reserved for a very specific class. Especially with the advent of AI, it feels like the time I had left to learn and actually build something has run out.Cyberspace, which I chose as an escape, is ultimately dominated by real-world capital. And if you want to catch up to the early settlers, there isn't much you can do as a citizen of the Third World. Between China's self-sustaining ecosystem and America's global standard, there is no place for me. The physical frontier is closed, and I arrived too late even for the cyber frontier.Language barriers, capital, platforms—they form just another rigid hierarchy. To enter the open-source world, someone from the periphery must learn English, assimilate into its cultural nuances, and master programming languages that are inherently far more difficult to learn if your native tongue is not English. There are countless more gates to pass through, yet the seats are strictly limited.This essay spoke of a free and open frontier, but for someone like me, it is merely standing outside a shining castle, longing for it, shouting for someone to open the gates. But I do not possess the skills that the people inside that castle desire and admire.I have merely migrated from a physical colony to a digital one. How much longer can I be consumed like this? Sometimes, the inside of that castle—as seen on HN—looks so warm. But my reality is always cold. I simply envy those who were privileged enough to experience the 90s cyber-romanticism portrayed in this essay.
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  cb321
  I think this was written in 1994 for this conference https://seclists.org/interesting-people/1994/Mar/64 , but I'm not 100% sure. It refers to "last summer's coup in the Soviet Union" which may also date it. Maybe it should have a (1994) in the title. Or, I don't know, maybe it's from even earlier? Some of the other pieces have nice dates at the bottom, like the Declaration of Independence for Cyberspace a bit over 30 years ago. EDIT: @karel-3d elsethread seems to think this one is (1998).
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  davidwritesbugs
  His "A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace" was the most unintentionally comical thing I read at the time. Like his lyrics and prose it was woefully pretentious & leaden. I also met him once. A more unpleasant, up his own ass, person I can barely recall.
• aidenn0
  > I believe most of this activity is a giant make-work project designed to keep us out of trouble and on the payroll while Asian robots churn out most of the physical things we really need...Asian, yes. Robots, no (or at least not in the sense of the sci-fi image of one man in a factory whose only job is to press "start" at the beginning of the shift and "stop ad the end of the shift). We didn't abolish the labor, we reduced it a bit and moved it away from us.[edit]Productivity in Asia was even lower when this article was written (no date, but mentions that there are 800,000 computers on the internet).
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  dzonga
  > bytes which no one can chew, architecture no one can inhabit, and software which keeps no cold winter wind from anyone's bodies.this hits hard.hopefully we can start making physical stuff again & teaching kids how to do so.
• ynac
  Anyone see a link to the audio / video, or better transcription? The text seems to have been transcribed and the typos / mistakes are splitting the intended meanings of things. Some of which seem to be causing misunderstandings in here. (Dialup for the day here, or I'd do it myself)
• bpoyner
  He's describing my great grandmother's childhood in territorial Arizona, down to the riding a horse to a one-room school house. Her family were all tough ranchers living a lifestyle most of us can't really comprehend.
• layer8
  (1992)(See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48136937.)
• deepsun
  There's no date in it. What it was written?
• RetroTechie
  Insightful, funny, colorful, visionary in places & not a speck of naivety in sight. Well worth the read."(..) tending to favor the creation of small, fast-moving, short-lived adhocracies...digitized hunter-gatherer groups roaming the steppes of Cyberspace."They're called startups. Or hacker groups, if you will. Not much difference between those 2 imho.
• mohamedkoubaa
  Masterclass in navel gazing
• pwillia7
  Reminds me of Wendell Berry or even Cormac Mccarthy's writing. Great piece.
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  RickJWagner
  “Here, guns were part of the furniture, and my taciturn neighbors used them on one another with heart-breaking regularity. These domestic killers rarely went to jail, since they could usually remind the jury that the deceased, whom most of the jurors knew, needed killing anyway.”It’s enjoyable reading, but I realized the author wasn’t to be taken seriously at this point.
• karel-3d
  (1998)edit: so 1994
• actionfromafar
  "While these electronic thickets may afford the best guerrilla jungle that ever harbored discontents, certain kinds of technological development could render it as flat and barren of hiding places as the salt deserts of the American West."
• throwanem
  [flagged]