Barlow, Bodies, and Digital Babylon

“We are creating a world that all may enter without privilege or prejudice accorded by race, economic power, military force, or station of birth.”

John Barlow’s ‘A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace’ certainly paints a pretty picture. His 1996 manifesto spouts off in defiant voice his utopian vision for the future of cyberspace, one in which “anyone, anywhere” may express his or her beliefs without fear of being “coerced into silence or conformity”. A world free from hierarchy, regulation, and material constraint.

Now, I am typically a cynical person. I don’t try to deny that. But even I can recognise that it would take one pessimistic b****** to see Barlow’s manifestation as anything other than a positive step in the right direction.

However, problems begin to arise when you pull back the curtain and begin to peer a little bit further. Somewhere beyond the alluring rhetoric of liberation, freedom, and transcendence. It is only then that you can recognise it for what it is: pure fantasy.

Throughout his sixteen-paragraph-long paper, Barlow assures us that Cyberspace exists entirely detached from the world of “matter”. As he states, his world is “not where bodies live” and therefore order cannot be obtained using “physical coercion”. It is planted on this shaky pillar of logic that Barlow’s dreams come crashing down.

If recent events tell us anything, it is that the internet is far from detached from the physical world beyond it. One only has to look as far back as the 2020 US election, in which Donald Trump “electrified and galvanised” his supporters on social media in the lead up to January 6th, tweeting out that it was “statistically impossible” for him to have lost and urging his followers to protest. Trump equally attributes much of his success in being re-elected to the work of online media figures, including that of the late Charlie Kirk. Turns out the digital world doesn’t hover above reality but leaks straight into it, spilling from the screen into the streets.

Every morsel of the internet, its algorithms and data-driven narrative pushing, is neatly concocted to tug at our brain’s reward systems, showing us whatever makes our dopamine spike the most: outrage, desire, affirmation, and outrage again. Cyberspace and its insatiable attention economy are undoubtedly not detached from our biology; they FEED on it.

Almost three decades later, the idea that the internet could exist apart from the material now feels laughable. Despite its illusory exterior, cyberspace has always been tied to the physical world that sustains it, built on servers, cables, energy, and real human labour. Rather than an escape from human nature, the internet exists as an extension of it. If there’s any hope left, it’s in recognising that technology cannot free us from the physical bodies we inhabit, and that the sooner we face up to the problems of the material world, the better.

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