by Erik Davis
Nowadays, when the binary outback has given way to the neon Vegas of the World Wide Web, the frontier metaphor resounds with the hollowness of a Roy Rogers piggy bank. Nonetheless, the image of the digital frontier contains more truth than even its early enthusiasts may have realized. The Western frontier was not a utopia of self-determinism, of course, but an anxious crossroads of conflicting powers that played out the young country’s violent tension between self-sufficient individualism and the necessity of creating community out of mottled peoples without much shared history to fall back on. The anxiety and longing produced by this endless struggle, which continues to characterize American consciousness, helped create the background alienation that subtly drives so many cybernomads, and explains as well the interminable and often sentimental discussions about virtual community. One of the most fascinating aspects of the WELL, the electronic tavern where much of this frontier talk first got bandied about, was the fact that the BBS was composed of a bunch of die-hard, freethinking soloists who became obsessed with their own sense of being, in some historically unprecedented manner, a group.
The image of cyberspace as frontier also rings true because the myth contains its own disappearance, its own twilight decline. In the brooding and melancholic westerns that Hollywood started producing in the 1950s and 1960s, the Wild West is always already fading, its rebels sacrificed to the engines of progress, its wide open spaces farmed and fenced. In its own way, cyberspace restaged this imposition of existing social and political structures upon the uncharted territory encountered by its earliest pioneers. By the early 1990s, the independent code cowboys and hacker outlaws of the 1980s underground were being hired out as Pinkertons and ranch hands, while bankers, lawyers, Christian schoolmarms, and AOL greenhorns started logging in expecting Mainstreet USA. Communications conglomerates started carving up the network’s backbone like robber barons, while businesses, state agencies, and subscriber websites started unrolling the barbed wire of firewalls and restricted access across the formerly free range of public space.
Many passionate netheads actively resisted the commercialization and privatization of cyberspace, and the meddling of government archons sometimes provoked storms of protest, especially in the United States. To preserve the Net’s wide-open spaces from state control, Barlow and other computer mavens founded the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), a well-funded advocacy group devoted to anticensorship efforts, cyberrights, and encryption issues. Once sucked inside the DC beltway, the EFF mellowed its stance somewhat, although the foundation did put up quite a fight against the Communications Decency Act, the federal government’s noxious 1996 attempt to censor cyberspace, and it continues to resist the onrushing forces of control. Curiously, many netheads believe that EFF stands for the Electronic Freedom Foundation, a confusion between freedom and frontier that is symptomatic of the deeply American conviction discussed above: the assumption that liberty equals nature, or rather the self in nature, unrestrained by state power and the collective demands of history and society.
Applied to the Internet, this conviction received its most rhetorically sublime peak in Barlow’s “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace.” Barlow shot off this widely circulated online diatribe in February 1996, when governments from the United States to Germany to Singapore were attempting to impose various restrictions on the growing digital culture. Written with Barlow’s characteristic verve and Wyoming-sized spirit, the text interweaves so many of the themes we’ve been discussing—nature, self-determination, gnostic disembodiment, the borderless America of the mind—that it is worth citing at length:
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.
We have no elected government, nor are we likely to have one, so I address you with no greater authority than that with which liberty itself always speaks. I declare the global social space we are building to be naturally independent of the tyrannies you seek to impose on us.… Cyberspace does not lie within your borders. Do not think that you can build it, as though it were a public construction project. You cannot. It is an act of nature and it grows itself through our collective actions.7
In Barlow’s hands, cyberspace becomes both a terrain and an “act of nature,” an essentially mythological concept that allows him to construct the Internet as a technological rerun of the borderless (though inhabited) continent that greeted America’s early colonists. Once Barlow establishes this virtual ground, he then goes on to tell the bloated, bad-guy governments just how unnatural the digital environment actually is:
Cyberspace consists of transactions, relationships, and thought itself, arrayed like a standing wave in the web of our communications. Ours is a world that is both everywhere and nowhere, but it is not where bodies live.… Your legal concepts of property, expression, identity, movement, and context do not apply to us. They are based on matter. There is no matter here.8
With its Jeffersonian individualism and bodiless fulfillment, Barlow’s vision of a “civilization of the Mind” clearly rests upon the core of American gnosis, a “here” that is nowhere on earth. His Declaration also shows the degree to which the Internet has become, in the words of the German media critic Pit Schultz, a “collective hallucination of freedom.”
One problem with this neo-gnostic, libertarian psychology is that it needs tyrannical archons to attack; otherwise, there is no ready explanation for the fact that life in human societies (and human bodies) is composed of limitations and constraints. In the most extreme cases, the search for archons leads to what the historian Richard Hofstadter famously named the “paranoid style” of American politics: a conspiracy-minded tendency to intensify ordinary power struggles into Manichaean battles between good and evil. This is the suspicious and often puritanical mind frame that lurks behind the Salem witch trials, the Anti-Masonic Party of the nineteenth century, Senator Joe McCarthy, and today’s right-wing narratives about New World Order cabals and the Illuminati. Tuning in to the rebel yells that choke AM radio and satellite frequencies across the land, one hears the paranoia of crude neo-gnostic myth: loud and clear tales of free, God-fearing individuals who wage guerrilla warfare against creepy conspiracies whose various tentacles are stamped with federal insignia.
Barlow is no paranoid, but he definitely has his archons. The tyrannical actions that motivated him to rattle off the Declaration were the “hostile and colonial” attempts of governments to regulate cyberspace, power grabs that “place us [i.e., netizens] in the same position as those previous lovers of freedom and self-determination who had to reject the authorities of distant, uninformed powers.” Notice that these “uninformed powers” are associated not only with ignorance, but also with the lower order of matter, and it is precisely this association with matter that is their downfall online. Because the rule of states is based on material borders and physical coercion, the archons have no power in bodiless cyberspace. Barlow implies that with these ignorant leviathans out of the way, Jefferson’s dreams of liberty—which somehow did not so bountifully emerge from flesh-and-blood-and-steel America—will be realized. In cyberspace, all may immigrate and act without privilege or prejudice or force, all may speak their minds, and a form of governance will naturally emerge based on enlightened self-interest, the commonweal, and the ethics of the Golden Rule.
The gnostic dimension of Barlow’s vision lies beneath the surface of his utopian technopolitics, but the link between gnosticism and libertarian sentiments is explicitly made by Stephan Hoeller, the Jungian writer mentioned earlier, who also acts as bishop of a Gnostic Church in Los Angeles. Like other contemporary esoteric practitioners, Hoeller derives much of his spiritual sustenance from the alchemical myths, hermetic practices, and gnostic notions of Western esotericism. But unlike many twentieth-century proponents of the Mysteries, Hoeller has not adopted a react
ionary antimodernism but instead embraces the same giddy libertarian politics that came to dominate the digital ether. Unlike most libertarians, who are by and large a rather rationalist and atheist lot, Hoeller grounds his politics in the spirit—the pneuma, to be exact. In his book Freedom: Alchemy for a Voluntary Society, he defines the ancient Gnostics as spiritual libertarians, arguing that they “saw themselves as the vanguard of human freedom, struggling by the use of spiritual means against the ubiquitous forces of tyranny in the realms of nature and being.”9 As a Jungian, Hoeller underlines the psychological aspects of this struggle, arguing that the Gnostics were “technicians of individuation” who attempted to overcome the internal archons that rule our mundane, messed-up psyches. But Hoeller also sees the demiurgic hands of tyranny in all manner of mass movements, ecological ideologies, and architectures of state power. Arguing that “the work of social transformation must not be managed or organized externally,” he envisions the sort of free and open society of self-engendering individuals trumpeted by Wired magazine or the utopian proponents of laissez-faire global capitalism.10
Though your average technolibertarian is more likely to wax mystical about Adam Smith’s invisible hand than about occult states of consciousness, Hoeller’s ideas provide a kind of archetypal snapshot of the psychological dynamics that may motivate some American libertarians. “Human beings are not on earth to be citizens, or taxpayers, or socially engineered pawns of other human beings; rather they are here in order to grow, to transform, to become their authentic selves.”11 Having fled Hungary as a young man, Hoeller certainly earned his hatred for social engineering, and only nihilists would argue with his core belief that the purpose of human life, such as it is, involves growth, transformation, and a striving for meaning and authenticity. But with their strange brew of free speech monomania, capitalist Prometheanism, and intense antipathy toward regulation, libertarians take this core inspiration to often dangerous heights. Countless blueprints for the libertarian great society are bandied about, but the guiding lines usually include ideas about the sovereignty of the individual; ferocious attacks on state mechanisms that constrain the productive force of market competition; loads of contract law; and the conviction that private property is at least as essential to genuine liberty as civil rights. Though libertarians share many economic notions with traditional conservatives, they are far more interested in freedom and experimentation than tradition; many would feel a lesbian leather fetishist’s horror of being stuck in an elevator with the likes of Gary Bauer or Pat Robertson. In fact, about the only thing that libertarians might hold sacred is the First Amendment: the holy separation of church and state, and the inviolable grace of free speech protection—a principle so heady and pure that in the heat of debate, it can hit the brain like pure oxygen.
For a taste of this mental rush, all you have to do is poke around the newsgroups and political websites of cyberspace, for libertarianism lives and thrives (and rants) on the Net like no other socioeconomic or ethical philosophy. In many ways, libertarianism seems perfectly designed for life in the nomad zones of the Internet. As Steven Levy shows in his great history Hackers, the hacker worldview was defined from its beginning in the 1960s by an antiauthoritarian love of open systems, experiment, and the free flow of information—sociocultural qualities that have been progressively incarnated into the technical structure of the Internet. Nonetheless, libertarianism became popular among America’s programmers, engineers, and technological entrepreneurs long before the advent of cyberspace (a healthy chunk of the candidates that the Libertarian Party has been chucking at California voters for decades earned their keep from computer-related fields). This popularity makes sense: Libertarian arguments usually appeal to that chunk of your brain that cherishes self-evident truths, common sense, and the clear dictates of reason—and that finds rhetorical appeals to compassion, traditional morals, and social responsibility murky, suspicious, and unpleasantly religious in tone. For evident reasons (and admittedly overgeneralized ones as well), this cool, masculine, and somewhat emotionally hamstrung “style” resonates with the stereotypical mind-set of many hackers and engineers, especially given their appreciation for clarity, systematic efficiency, and logical pragmatism.
Which is not to say that libertarians or engineers are devoid of imagination. Far from it—visionaries from both groups are in love with possibility and novelty, and embrace the hard imaginative work that goes into designing systems and disruptive technologies that other people can barely wrap their brains around. It’s no accident that both camps have also played a significant role in the production and consumption of science fiction, the twentieth century’s most ardent, visionary, and technologically savvy literature of ideas. Besides exploring many different libertarian possibilities in their fabulations, SF writers like Vernor Vinge, Robert Heinlein, and Robert Anton Wilson have penned a number of texts central to American libertarian thought.
All these overlapping sympathies help lend cyberlibertarianism its distinct flavor—a kind of synthetic, vitamin-rich tang. But libertarianism is really just Yankee slang for anarchism, whose nineteenth-century European proponents were committed to the dream embedded in the very etymology of their cause: an-arkhos, without rules, and especially without those archons who maintain rules by force. Some anarchists were radical individualists, while others shared many of the collective goals of socialism. Refusing to accept the coercive and cynical violence of state power or the mentality of the herd, anarchists dared to imagine a world that respected the autonomous strivings, desires, and voluntary commitments of individuals and small, self-organized communities.
Significantly, many of the utopias envisioned by nineteenth- and twentieth-century anarchists were foreshadowed in the religious visions of radical sectarians who bedeviled the medieval Church and helped turn the Protestant Reformation into a carnival of dissidents, revolutionaries, and apocalyptic sects. For groups like the Anabaptists, the Diggers, and the followers of the Free Spirit (all spiritual radicals marked with shades of gnostic enthusiasm), worldly institutions stood in the way of God’s free grace, the spontaneous promptings of the spirit, and the wisdom of the individual mind. This convulsive tradition of spiritual anarchism is not dead. In his 1985 polemical tract T.A.Z., the anarcho-Sufi ranter Hakim Bey invokes the “temporary autonomous zone,” a nomadic slice of space-time where desires are liberated from commodity consumption and social forms follow the chaotic logic of the Tao. Though Bey is highly critical of cyberhype, his political and poetic vision of the T.A.Z. became a highly influential conceptual fetish for the digital underground.
Modern anarchists dispensed with the deus ex machina of divine spiritual grace, but they still needed to imagine some positive and productive force that would take up the slack once the state dissolved. Some turned to Nature, believing that human beings were instinctively drawn to cooperative social behavior, and that spontaneous human desire was inherently good. Others were captured by the utopian images of social organization that also inspired Marxists, images that implied that the dialectical engine of historical evolution was just about to turn a glorious corner. Mikhail Bakunin predicted that “there will be a qualitative transformation, a new living, life-giving revelation, a new heaven and a new earth, a young and mighty world in which all our present dissonances will be resolved into a harmonious whole.”12 It was precisely this sort of secular millennialism that led the conservative modern historian Eric Voegelin to condemn all such apocalyptic social endeavors as gnostic heresies.
Today many libertarians think another sort of New Jerusalem is just about to touch down upon our fragile globe: the total revolution of information capitalism. The “living, life-giving revelation” that today’s cyberlibertarians will tell you about is the emergent neobiological properties of an unfettered free market seeded with databases, microwaves, and fiber-optic cables; the new heaven and new earth you’ll find in their futurist scenarios is an entrepreneurial dream, of floating tax-free islands, hog-tied gov
ernments, mind-boggling new technologies, and the eradication of “public space” and “social responsibility” from the imaginations of men. The reason that so many of today’s libertarians love the Net is that its very structure—decentralized, relatively unregulated, rich with opportunity—incarnates a libertarian ideal, or, at the very least, technologically resists centralized control. As the cypherpunk John Gilmore famously put it, the Net recognizes attempts at censorship as damage and routes around them. The Net has thus become a simulacrum of a possible libertarian world: an unregulated plenitude where technological wizardry and a clean hack can overcome the inertia of embodied history, where ossified political and economic structures will melt down into the liquid flow of bits, and where the New Atlantis of liberty appears as an evolutionary wave of digicash you either surf or suffer through.
The animating archetype of the information economy, its psychological spunk, lies in a gnostic flight from the heaviness and torpor of the material earth, a transition from the laboring body into the symbol-processing mind. Writing of the “liberating force” of high tech, Hoeller notes that