The original pioneers of the internet were a group of libertarians from Northern California. They saw themselves as settlers that explored and expanded “The Electronic Frontier”, and John Perry Barlow even boded a more fair and humane civilisation without any interferences from monstrous governments in his A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace. In the early days of Wired Magazine, they spoke of a digital revolution, proclaimed a new optimism and of course predicted the famous information superhighway. The ultimate triumph would be “decentralizing, globalizing, harmonizing, and empowering,” as Nicholas Negroponto wrote in Being Digital from 1996.

The ultimate triumph

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