Excerpts from:

Cyberspace and Realplace
The full text is available in Swedish at CRAC in Context

Lars Ilshammar is head of public relations at the University of ÷rebro in Sweden. He is also a doctoral candidate in History. At present he is writing a thesis on the development of IT-policy in Sweden during the period 1970-1998.

"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."

"You will most certainly recognize this quotation. It is John Barlow declaring the independence of Cyberspace in February 1996. The text bears the title A declaration of the independence of Cyberspace and claims, as it is, to be the declaration of independence of the net citizens, The Netizens. It is a revolutionary message with the same political and social force as the eighteenth century ideas of the free, equal citizen. After an era when ideologies seem to have been extinct, Hegel's old world spirit is obviously in motion again.

Of course I haven't chosen this qoutation because it is new and surprising, but on the contrary because it is almost too characteristic of our time. When Barlow claims -- quite seriously, as it seems -- that the growing net society now has reached the point where it is time to leave the old Industrial World behind, he is the interpreter of a widely spread notion: Cyberspace as an alternative and maybe an even more real reality than the ordinary physical world in which we live."/.../

/.../"Cyberspace is often thougt of as something immaterial, an alternative reality based solely on digital codes. This notion of a global computer space without borders goes, in its turn, hand in hand with the deterministic notion that development is automatic and that all you have to do is sit down and wait for the good forces to start spreading all over the world. But technology is primarily a social construction, the result of our conscious and unconscious actions, or non-actions. And Cyberspace has no independent existence outside our ordinary reality. Because in order to create and maintain Cyberspace we need a scaffold built of material things: concrete things like telephone cables, computers, switchboards -- things one can touch and control. Thus Cyberspace is an infrastructure -- the biggest in history. And like all infrastructures in history Cyberspace is reigned by questions of power like: who? where to? at what price?"/.../

/.../"But is it really that easy? New radical thoughts and ideas about how life should be formed and society organized are born in Cyberspace. For the last five or ten years we have seen a strong cultural and social flow from Cyberspace back to Realplace. In that way Cyberspace redifines its material prerequisites, at the same time as these material prerequisites form Cyberspace. Political scientists call this kind of interplay a "complex interdependence". Dialectics is another word that comes to mind. The strongest and most winning of the thoughts that originate from Cyberspace is undoubtedly the idea of the freedom of information, "Information wants to be free". This idea originates from a distrust of traditional politics and established authorities and a conviction that information should be free and accessible for everyone, everywhere. No cencorship, no central power, no intervention of authorities is allowed, Cyberspace shall be built solely on people's free and spontanoeus co-operation."...

... "But I believe that when free co-operation is regarded as synonymous with the market, and when free information means free as long as you can pay for it then Cyberspace runs the risk of becoming a threat against itself. A marketizing of Cyberspace means a marketizing of Realplace, which in turn will lead to a situation where the idea of an all-embracing information space is hard to maintain when market relations seem ready to conquer yet another aspect of human life. Maybe it is a cultural war that is going on in the silence of Cyberspace, a war of the meaning of the word "free". And the parties involved in the war seems to be, on the one hand, those who want to exploit information technology for money, and, on the other, those who still believe in the original, beautiful IT-dream whithout any oppressive structures.So what happens to democracy in Cyberspace, to freedom? The answer is probably dependent on the political and social force in the phrase information wants to be free when confronted with the billions of dollars that is now spent claiming new electronic domains in Cyberspace.

John Barlow has already given his answer to the question:"Cyberspace is where your money is"."

Translation by Gudrun Samuelsson