cyberspace

In a 1996 essay that was republished by 500 websites – the closest you could get to going viral back then – US poet and cattle rancher John Perry Barlow argued: “Governments of the Industrial World, 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.”

Just as Barlow, in his 1996 essay, told governments they were not welcome in Cyberspace, some online users might have a similar message to give to social media algorithms.

The great irony is that modern life and culture’s hapless dependence on a functional internet—CrowdStrike, anyone?—makes it imperative that vast troves of history be copied in some form onto cyberspace; otherwise, it might as well not exist.

“A DDoS attack sends a very large number of signals to an online target to disrupt it,” Anthony Lim, Director of the Centre for Strategic Cyberspace and International Studies in Singapore, told the BBC.

This internet-transforming decision will not, cannot, upturn all of cyberspace overnight—the overall tech-stock plunge notwithstanding.