February 8 marks the silver anniversary of an iconic early manifesto defending the Internet as a space where personal liberties and social cooperation might flourish free of political control … just in time. John Perry Barlow emailed “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace” from the World Economic Forum the day Bill Clinton signed into law restraints on free expression via the Telecommunications Act of 1996.

Barlow couldn’t have foreseen that on February 2, 2021, The New York Times would print a call for incoming President Joe Biden to appoint a “reality czar” to verify online information.  He did predict that national administrative substitutes for “parental responsibilities” would fail to contain “the virus of liberty” in “a world that will soon be blanketed in bit-bearing media.”

Barlow’s Declaration promptly became ubiquitous in the cyberspace it extolled, its text reposted on tens of thousands of web pages (no mean feat when websites numbered in the hundreds of thousands). Detractors penned multiple Declarations of the Dependence of Cyberspace on governmental oversight, misinterpreting Barlow’s ideal of a World Wide Web freed from rulers as a Wild West Web un-moored by rules.

Barlow himself noted on his Declaration’s twentieth anniversary that it had become largely remembered as “an example of the sort of wooly-headed hippie thinking we could entertain in more innocent times.”  He admitted that he had overly high hopes for the amount of “horizontally networked consensus” that would result, and that he had underestimated the new medium’s potential for abuse.

Yet if Barlow under-emphasized the basis of his confidence in voluntary agreement to those who lacked his experience with the “unwritten social contracts” undergirding everyday life in his home state of Wyoming, he himself failed to fully appreciate its power.  He told Reason magazine in 2004 that the very nation-states he had famously declared “weary giants of flesh and steel” eight years before were now “the only force I know that is fairly reliable” at “countervailing against monopoly.”

To the contrary, political gigantism is the source of economic monopoly.  United States Steel Corporation chairman Elbert Henry Gary feared the “bitter warfare” of unregulated competition, as have industrialists closer on the cutting edge to U.S. Robotics than U.S. Steel.  Microsoft called for the United States to enact “a broad, nationwide privacy law” in 2005, just as users were abandoning Microsoft Internet Explorer for more secure competing web browsers like Firefox and Opera. Similar regulatory capture tipped the balance away from such alternatives and toward the consolidation of the Internet into a handful of centralized platforms.

Freedom of exit to innovative upstarts can still restore the potential of the early Internet to secure freedom in virtual reality, and in the real world “of flesh and steel” as well.

New Yorker Joel Schlosberg is a contributing editor at The William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

1. “Brave New World Wide Web Revisited” by Joel Schlosberg, OpEdNews, February 6, 2021
2. “Brave new world wide web revisited” by Joel Schlosberg, Intrepid Report, February 8, 2021
3. “Brave New World Wide Web revisited” by Joel Schlosberg, Elko, Nevada Daily Free Press, February 8, 2021
4. “Brave New World Wide Web Revisited” by Joel Schlosberg, Richmond, North Carolina Observer, February 9, 2021
5. “Brave new World Wide Web revisited” by Joel Schlosberg, Brattleboro, Vermont Reformer, February 9, 2021
6. “Brave New World Wide Web Revisited” by Joel Schlosberg, Ventura County, California Citizens Journal, February 11, 2021
7. “Brave New World Wide Web Revisited” by Joel Schlosberg, Pottstown, Pennsylvania Mercury, February 12, 2021
8. “Brave New World Wide Web Revisited” by Joel Schlosberg, The Phoenix Reporter & Item [Phoenixville, Pennsylvania], February 12, 2021
9. “Brave New World Wide Web Revisited” by Joel Schlosberg, The Delaware County [Pennsylvania] Daily Times, February 12, 2021
10. “Brave New World Wide Web Revisited” by Joel Schlosberg, Mainline Media News [Exton, Pennsylvania], February 12, 2021
11. “Brave New World Wide Web Revisited” by Joel Schlosberg, Montgomery News [Lansdale, Pennsylvania], February 12, 2021
12. “Brave New World Wide Web Revisited” by Joel Schlosberg, Daily Local News [West Chester, Pennsylvania], February 12, 2021
13. “Brave New World Wide Web Revisited” by Joel Schlosberg, The Times Herald [Port Huron, Michigan], February 12, 2021

New Year’s Eve partiers had good reason to celebrate at the stroke of midnight on January 1. If the end of 2020 felt like a farewell to the missteps of more than one previous year, in a way it truly was. The culture of the year 1925 broke free from shackles imposed in 1998.

That year’s Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act was far from the first of its kind. The United States Congress had reinterpreted its Constitutional mandate to grant an “exclusive Right” to creative works “for limited Times” to encompass increasingly longer periods of time. When George Washington signed the original Copyright Act into law, copyrights spanned at most 28 years. Bill Clinton’s pen bumped them from 75 years to 95.

What was unprecedented was that the additional decades didn’t just apply to new works whose creators might possibly be incentivized, but to Jazz Age classics already due to enter the public domain. A 1995 New York Times article quoted a representative of Houghton Mifflin on how they would “like to publish a successful book exclusively forever;” the 1998 Copyright Term Extension Act was close enough, setting the precedent for further re-extensions in the future.

Copyrights with no effective end point might seem to be simply be the “intellectual property” equivalent of the physical kind. To the contrary, as Ayn Rand observed, they “would become a cumulative lien on the production of unborn generations, which would ultimately paralyze them.” If “Jack London fought as fiercely to control the copyright on his work as he fought for” the revolutionary socialism advocated in his writings (as noted by The Radical Jack London editor Jonah Raskin, who adds that the expiration of their copyrights that made the 2008 collection possible “would no doubt rankle him”), free-market radicals have fought to get copyrights under control.

Self-described “Ayn Rand freak” Michael S. Hart founded Project Gutenberg to give away royalty-free electronic books “for the most selfish of reasons — because I want a world that has Project Gutenberg in it.” James M. Buchanan and Milton Friedman were among the laissez-faire luminaries who detailed the economic losses of excessive copyright terms in a legal brief endorsing the overturn of the Copyright Term Extension Act.

This challenge, culminating in the the Supreme Court’s Eldred v. Ashcroft decision, was unsuccessful. Yet the absence of a follow-up Extended Extension Act has allowed some of the “limited Times” to eventually reach their limit. Publications from 1923 finally entered the public domain in 2019, and the rest of the Roaring Twenties are gradually following suit. Meanwhile, some creatives are releasing their copyrights early. This past October, Tom Lehrer waived copyright restrictions to his songs, so that nobody will have to wait until 2061 to update his satires of New Math and Hubert H. Humphrey.

The 2020s face many problems, but a failure to learn from the 1920s need not be one of them.

New Yorker Joel Schlosberg is a contributing editor at The William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

1. “Let the Twenties roar free” by Joel Schlosberg, Anchorage, Alaska Press, January 2, 2021
2. “Let the Twenties Roar Free” by Joel Schlosberg, Ventura County, California Citizens Journal, January 3, 2021
3. “Let the twenties roar free” by Joel Schlosberg, The Lebanon, Indiana Reporter, January 5, 2021
4. “Let the ’20s roar free” by Joel Schlosberg, Claremont, NH Eagle Times, January 6, 2021
5. “Let the Twenties Roar Free” by Joel Schlosberg, Roundup, MT Record Tribune & Winnett Times, January 6, 2021
6. “Let the Twenties Roar Free” by Joel Schlosberg, OpEdNews, January 7, 2021

Some of the richest young heirs plan to use their inherited wealth “to undo systems that accumulate money for those at the top” despite being among them (“Silver-Spoon Socialists,” The New York Times, November 29). Convinced that “true wealth redistribution means redistributing authority” rather than mere largesse, they are “investing in or donating to credit unions, worker-owned businesses, community land trusts, and nonprofits” that spread power as well as money.

Such alternatives have long been dismissed as marginal, it having been assumed that only concentration of political power can effectively fight concentration of economic power. As Doug Henwood has advised anti-corporate protesters, “socialize Merck, don’t dissolve it,” since he considers “large, complex organization” necessary. Such urgings were little needed at the close of a twentieth century when socialization had become almost synonymous with nationalization (or at the very least heavy regulation).

Yet the move away from such a conflation two decades into the twenty-first century was anticipated as far back as the nineteenth, when the economic stratagems of Josiah Warren, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and Benjamin Tucker aimed at what Tucker called “subjecting capital to the natural law of competition.” A freer market could “socialize its effects by making its use beneficial to all instead of a means of impoverishing the many to enrich the few.”

Even as the twentieth century produced unprecedented amassings of wealth and power, attentive historical scholars confirmed Tucker’s view that legal privileges entrenched dominant firms and blocked the benefits of market exchange in the realms of banking, real estate, international trade, and invention. Bertrand Russell observed that “the harm that is done by great industrialists is usually dependent upon their access to some source of monopoly power.” Gabriel Kolko showed how “it was not the existence of monopoly that caused the federal government to intervene in the economy, but the lack of it.”

The sources of monopoly power identified by Tucker are still the primary factors that distort free trade into unfair trade. Those interested in using what they have to help have-nots should aim to reroute the economy beyond those barriers — or remove them entirely.

New Yorker Joel Schlosberg is a contributing editor at The William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

• “The negative philanthropic highway” by Joel Schlosberg, Lake Havasu City, AZ News, December 7, 2020
• “The negative philanthropic highway” by Joel Schlosberg, The Lebanon, Indiana Reporter, December 8, 2020