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Is the Concept of 'Cyberspace' Stupid?
frank_adrian314159 writes "In an article titled 'Stop Pretending Cyberspace Exists,' Salon writer Michael Lind notes that 'Some ideas make you dumber the moment you learn of them. One of those ideas is the concept of "cyberspace."' He says that analogizing cyberspace as a real place leads to an inability to think logically about laws, rules, and how and when the governments could or should intervene to regulate the Internet. He states that such a debate is essential, but that an '[invasion of] a mythical Oz-like kingdom called cyberspace is just as dopey' when talking about governments and corporations taking a larger role in online communications. Is Lind right? Does the notion of cyberspace make the debate over its governance less fruitful?"
Yes, the concept of 'Cybespace' is quite stupid.
The use of the word "cyber" is stupid in any computer-related context.
But it's not 1993 anymore. Instead of "cyberspace," just say "in the cloud" and you'll sound like you're living in 2013.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
It is plain stupid. A pure fantasy. Nothing else to say.
The notion of "cyberspace as place" ala Neuromancer may be a bit out dated, but it paints an interesting picture. As someone who does understand how networking works, I find the concepts from early cyber punk to be valuable attempts to try to imagine the future of a data driven world. We don't see pictures in the raw data, there is no blond in the red dress. But we can take the numbers and extract the blond in the red dress and make her visible to everyone.
If, however, someone's notion of cyberspace starts and ends at Tron, then they're going to have a hard time understanding the lack of control they have over the system.
But, that's not to say the the idea of cyberspace as place has no, well, place. People create communities on line, both private and public. These communities have their own rules both written and unwritten. If a government wants to regulate it's place in cyberspace, then it can attempt to do so. It's when governments try to regulate the cyberspace of people outside it's jurisdiction, that we run into issues where the concept of cyberspace can muddy the waters.
Laugh all you want at the retro-ness of the word 'cyberspace', of course, but let me just say this: I was born in 1986, so during my childhood the internet grew with me. I only barely remember there being a time when the internet was not widely used. Consequently, I essentially do think of the internet as a 'place', or least I imagine that an MRI scan would see the same area of my brain lighting up. And why not? It's infinitely more democratised, instantaneous and ubiquitous than any other prior communication medium. Which, at least in my subconscious, makes me think of it as closer to real life and place than to '0s and 1s on wires and in computers' in the same way I think about real life itself as such, rather than 'matter and energy bumping around in a universe of space-time'.
Take off every sig. For great justice.
... so is Texas.
For the same reasons, the Slashdot category of "your rights online" is equally stupid. Last I checked, "online" is not a nation or city state with its own legal code defining any actual rights.
What I really learned from this submission is that:
1) Salon still exists and, apparently, people read it?
2) This "Lind" guy was desperate for something to write an article about, at the last minute.
I guess this was something that sounded hip and cool back then when the WorldWideWeb was new, but now that we all know what computers and the internet can do, it sounds a bit dated.
"Cyberpace" is a metaphor. Used as such, it is sometimes useful, but, like all metaphors, it can be misleading if taken as a literal description; the internet is obvious not a literal physical place.
Is "cyberspace" a stupid term? No. Is it sometimes used stupidly? Yes.
Obviously, none of the metaphors that come to mind when we are talking about a conventional "space" apply when you're talking about communications and networking. It's a different concept entirely.
He says that analogizing cyberspace as a real place leads to an inability to think logically about laws, rules, and how and when the governments could or should intervene to regulate the Internet.
So what he says is that if you stop using certain words, it becomes harder to think about things in ways that the author doesn't like. This is a classical Orwellian exercise.
Actually, cyberspace exists - just like many other intangibles exist. The reason we're Homo sapiens rather than some other primate is precisely because of our ability to work with intangibles. Some sophomoric selective limitation of this ability which suits a partiuclar belief system isn't going to make it go away.
Guys, how is this any different than "cloud" computing, or "cluster" computing, or pretty much the overwhelming majority of technical terms. Zip, unzip, explode, compress... yes, if I stopped and thought about it, I'd probably consider it perverted. And cloud computing doesn't mean we're all hovering above our cubes playing magical harps. Getting hungup on terminology is neither productive nor interesting.
The term "cyberspace" may be stupid, but it refers to something that is very real: The internet may just be a collection of wires, boxes with circuit boards in it, and a lot of ones and zeroes, but that is not how people look at it, anymore than they look at their car as a collection of fiberglass, steel bolts, and rubber. And the problems of the digital world aren't terribly hard to comprehend, nor do most of them require radical change in how we think about it.
Those of us under the age of 40 can conceptualize this "brave new world" quite well, and make moral and ethical decisions about it. Most of us understand and agree that privacy is a right, online and off. We may disagree about the particulars, but not the substance. Same with file sharing: Most of us are against people "pirating" for profit, but likewise have little objection to Joe Average maintaining his own personal collection of downloaded music and movies. This isn't hard for us to understand.
However, for people who grew up without computers, and are reluctant to embrace them, and still carry around Nokia phones from ten years ago because it's "more like a phone"... well, those people are more easily swayed by certain wealthy interests to look at it as a confusing and nebulous thing, and turn to said interests for guidance. Afterall... if you're rich, you must have done something right. There is a disconnect between our legislators (most of whom are 50+ years of age) and the general population (median age: 35).
The problems of "cyberspace" actually has nothing to do with technology: It has to do with people. Specifically, old people. Boomers. These people have taken an unwarranted familiarity with the technology and made bad decision after bad decision, institutionalizing ignorance and stupidity because that's what they were told to do. And that, really, is the only problem here.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
There is no cyberspace the same way there is no Narnia or Middle Earth.
I feel the same about the constant "3D printing is just like a replicator" and "private companies will colonize space" stories.
Wait until we have Virtual Reality and ask again. Other than that, we still use a bunch of webpages and instant messaging protocols which do not make a place, in my opinion. Of course, you could argue that anything done with virtual reality amounts to data traveling between a client-server or multiple-peers and then being interpreted by the engine. However, starting this discussion does call for entering into technical details of how the Internet/Cyberspace works, what is the Cyberspace, what is the definition of place, etc. Or then we might as well say the Internet is a series of tubes and be done with it.
I don't care if I'm wrong. I only care about everyone obtaining something from the discussion.
the electronic FRONTIER foundation.
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
It occurs to me that the concept of "Cyberspace" is not too distant from the concept of a soul in the individual. The soul seems to have originated, and continues to be accepted as a valid metaphysical concept, because we do not want to believe in ourselves as merely the firing of synapses in the brain. We want to believe that there is more going on there, something that supersedes those physical boundaries and makes us more than that. Thus, we think of the soul as a real thing, even as it's directly linked to our brains in some way. Thinking of Cyberspace as being more than the a mere collection of the computers, pathways between then, and signals being sent, is very similar. We seem to want to think of the Internet as more than the merely the the sum of those parts. Where the analogy breaks down of course, is that unlike the human brain, there is nothing we do not know about how the Internet functions. As such, it seems to me like the author is right, and we really should be taking a physicalist approach in order to have a meaningful conversation: The Internet really is merely the sum of it's parts, and nothing more. There is no "Cyberspace," it is a metaphysical mistake to think there is one, and it is a result of the way we use our language that lends credence to the concept.
Cloud is another example of the same. Read vendor's ad's replacing the word "cloud" with "service center" or "network" as appropriate and watch the magic go away. Read it to your boss and see his common sense come back online (unless, of course, you are being paid big bucks for the magic, then hide this and run away! run away!)
I do not know anyone who thinks of "cyberspace" in the terms that Mr. Lind writing about. In fact, I haven't even seen terms like "cyberspace" or "netizen" in quite some time. He just sounds a little cranky. I wonder who stepped on his gadget?
Cyberspace exists in the same way that stories in books exist; as information stored in the real world on some physical medium. We can imagine a new world based on that information, but that never removes it from existing as "simple" information in the physical world. Trying to govern it as anything other than what it is will just end up relying on metaphors that break down and cause problems.
This is a problem with all names with a kind of non-uniqueness. The moment you use a common word (like space) to describe an idea or concept, you limit the mental map. For example, I find that using the word "saved" in a religious context limiting for the same reason. "Saved" in generally a good thing. So you start thinking the alternative (not being saved by religion) as bad.
As for the laws, we already have something I consider similar: the European Union. A region without real political unification, but with a sort of economic unification to allow free transport of goods, services, and capital. Which is kind of like `cyberspace', except information is included instead of goods (I'm not sure what the current status of the European Union Copyright Law is).
I know that the analogy goes back to a 'spatial' interpretation, but calling it the cloud or cyberworld or cyber-dimension (which might be another good way to think of it?) would bring similar problems in restricting our mental map of things.
Basing a critique of a term on its earliest use is beyond ludicrous. The concept of cyberspace is with us because we needed it and couldn't find anything better to define the phenomenon. Smart people well versed in the matter have debated this very point for a long time and we haven't yet found a more apt or useful word to explain the body of communication that traverses the Internet but is not limited to its technology. It is not the virtual reality dream of yesterday but it is a real environment with properties that differ from other realms. The idea of theft must redefined where taking something of value does not deprive the owner of its use. The impact of intrusion, harassment, and contraband all change in this arena of continual communication. Mr Lind seems to believe that the Internet is owned by governments and the have the ability to control it in much the same way they control traffic. We need the word cyberspace so that countries can seperate the laws for the Internet so that they can be uniform globally, not clouded by local legal systems. Each country trying to do it on their own is why we are in this mess. No country can regulate the Internet but by creating a common operating environment it can regulate itself.
I have hated the term cyberspace ever since I first heard it applied to the Internet. There is no place in space that IS cyberspace. Of course if cyberspace doesn't exist then Cybercrime can't exist either. There can not be a crime that can only happen in a place that doesn't really exist. Of course all of the crimes that are thought of as cybercrimes are really just ordinary crimes done using a new technology. Stealing 10,000 social security numbers to commit identity theft is just a technological variant on a type of fraud that has been around for centuries. Obtaining copyrighted content over the Internet, becomes as it should always have been, a civil matter of copyright infringement and not called piracy which can again apply to taking over a physical vessel, whether on land, sea or air, but not in a place that doesn't really exist.
Unfortunately the concept of doing something that has been done for decades (think of scheduled deliveries of milk) becomes a new and patentable thing when done on a computer or over the Internet. That is the kind of thing that happens when people think of cyberspace as a real place and somehow a different place.
Just because its more of a 'concept' than a physical entity doesn't make it any less real.
When a bunch of rebels and outcasts when searching for gold, and good soil in the new world, it was cheered until it was found that some of them saw this as an oppertunity to do away with the cruel, tiered, hiearchial system of europe, and all its entitlements and entrapments.
Then a bunch of kings, princes, dukes, and their beneficiaries found about how there rules, titles and privledges where simply ignored in this "new world", they decided to let people know that that just because they are on the other side of the world, there powers, and hierarchies still exist awnd apply.
On a serious note, this concept of cyber space as a physical space never existed. There are, however decades of communities, with their own cultures that formed independantly of the TV culture of the time, and there have been unwritten rules about the internet.
The situation is the same, titleholders, owners, and the others who stat back while everyone else developed online, did nothing, but are now demanding controll of the internet, to make it an extension of the dull, boring, distraught, mainstream most of us sought to get away from 20 years prior. They also mean to press their statutory hierachy, in place of what used to be a meritocracy, destroying everything beautiful of the internet, and condemning us all to the same backwards, corrupt, dogmatic line of thinking the outside world uses
I have literally never uttered the words "cyberspace". I have heard of it and I have a vague idea of what it might mean. I have been using computers since the dawn of the internet, and I have been a professional programmer for 9 years. I never even realized there was any controversy over the word. I just figured it was a dumb catchphrase that only MSM used because they didn't know how not to sound old (like when my mom saying that she "tapes" things on her DVR).
I do like the analogy of the internet as a physical place. It works well. Packets of information are like cyber letters being delivered by a cyber post office to cyber addresses. Ideas like encryption and email sender spoofing also have great post office analogies. I think this analogy will go away once kids are born that will never mail or receive a letter by the post office.
Its a thing in which people have a persistent existence. In a lot of applications you exist as a virtual avatar. In MMOs...well that one is obvious. It contains storefronts, it has "laws of the kingdom," it is (in some places) unpredictably interactive, you can buy real estate, and it has it's own" currencies." Sounds like a strong enough parallel to justify theterm. Maybe not in the 80s...Even if it's not perfect...it's just a metaphor to teach stupid people..a learning framework of sorts.
Yes, of course it is. Unfortunately we are stuck with it: the sort of people who think that global warming might attract asteroids believe in it.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
... to put the series of tubes.
The concept that Cyberspace "exists" is just as silly as the concept (pardon, I mean "legal fiction") that Corporations are People.
If you deres us, do we not bleed photons?
Now, excuse me, I have to translate stored bits into screen displays so that people can understand what the genetic data "means".
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
There's an insightful source.
I wasn't born in Cyberspace, even if I remember using 110 baud modems on ARPANET.
But I was born in Texas.
The main question is: Did the Internet exist before we turned it on?
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
No.
Have gnu, will travel.
...cyberspace referred to virtual reality environments and that "cyberspace" as a synonym for the internet was PHB speak.
It's a big NO. The concept of cyberspace is not stupid. It's some people's understanding of it that is. As is the concept in some undeveloped minds that a "hacker" is a term for cyber-locksmith instead of cyber-craftsman. Eastasians alltime unknow and badsay words.
Upward mobility is a slippery slope - the higher you climb the more you show your ass.
"The Grid.
A digital frontier.
I tried to picture clusters of information as they moved through the computer.
What did they look like?
Ships, motorcycles? Were the circuits like freeways?
I kept dreaming of a world I thought I'd never see.
And then, one day...
I got in."
- Kevin Flynn
Cyberspace, though the term itself is dated, is becoming even more real. The real world has physical and political boundaries, laws, and interactions. The physical world also has arbitrary boundaries (note that there is no black line on the earth at the US/Mexico border). We exist in the physical world and are governed by a set of arbitrary laws (do not "steal" this set of bits, pay more for this widget because it has a fruit logo, this person is beautiful and therefore gifted with wealth and adoration).
I work with people in the real world that I have never met. I purchase goods and services from businesses that may or may not have a physical address and stockrooms.
When I enter "Cyberspace" there is no distinction between a physical store and a virtual one. Some online stores even show a picture of their checkout clerk (she's cute and looks a lot like the girl who helps me pick insurance and the girl from my cellular carrier). Some stores even show a picture of their physical store, but everyone knows that this can merely be clever marketers that know that people are slightly more likely to buy from physical stores with an online-presence than a purely online store.
When I interact with avatars in my fake world, and we're all in the same virtual room, it's no different than interacting with people over a conference call.
In a larger sense though, the virtual worlds act as an amazing proxy and model for real world issues. In the virtual world there are runs on banks, inflation, speculation. Life models art and art models life. In fact, we can also learn about interesting market conditions from studying virtual worlds.
Anyhoo.. I'm going back to watching my Caprica. Ciao.
if not in cyber space?
Without "cyberspace" we would be limited to describing the Internet in terms of its physical constitution: pieces of silicon and wire, electrons and current. Yet we all know that the purpose and usefulness of the Internet does not derive from the existence of those physical objects, or the exact details of movement of the various physical components. It would be just as useful even if it was constituted entirely differently.
If somebody asks "What happened on Slashdot today?" they are not asking for a plot of the CPU temperature.
From the article:
"There is no such place as cyberspace. It is not a parallel universe, coexisting with our world but in a different dimension. It is just a bad metaphor that has outlived its usefulness. Using the imagery of a fictitious country makes it harder to have rational arguments about government regulation or commercial exploitation of modern information and communications technologies."
But in fact people do commonly engage with a place with those qualities. They use assumed names and identities, abrogating or concealing or even faking gender, nationality, marital status, qualifications, employment, sexual orientation, religion etc. There *is* an online environment of dissimulation which exactly fits the metaphor. So how does "cyberspace" not exist? It doesn't have to exist because there is no barrier to being verifiable and identifiable and consequently accountable, but it does exist, and will do so for as long as more than one connected person wants it to and there are means to successfully disavow one's geographical, social and legal status. Whether any of that is a social or moral good is a completely different matter.
Only in such a place would a crap writer like that have anyone reading what he wrote...
Let alone actually PAYING him to do so.
That's a far cry from 'the real world'.
So yes. cyberspace is a real thing. and in it any hack two bit writer can get published and actually have some people browse over what they said and get paid for it.
So the argument is that the term "cyberspace" is in some way presenting a "gray beard" generation that is insistent on the Internet as a mechanism of change, and that the real "cyber-space" is in fact not interested in that change and reliant on governments to best server the protection of free expression? really? seriously? ....
I hope that I read that inaccurately... if I did not let me just say this... hello retard. Cyberspace is the freedom and ability to collaborate on ideas / which some might call a virtual "world"... for the first time since radio and TV shoved the ideas of whats right and wrong down peoples throats.... see "propoganda."
If the new generation thinks that "rebelling" means overturning the ability to actually talk to their friends and collaborate on ideas in a publicly viewable forum that may affect millions.... then enjoy living the history you clearly have not read or lived.
*in the voice of RED from the 70's show* DUMBASS
YES! The article has convinced me that I'm STUPIDER for having read the ARTICLE! I bELIEEEEEEVE! *aaahhhh!* *laaaahhhh!*
"Stratigraphically the origin of agriculture and thermonuclear destruction will appear essentially simultaneous" -- Lee
"....how and when the governments could or should intervene to regulate the Internet" -- dumbest concept I see.
analogizing Michael Lind' as a real place leads to an inability to think logically about laws, rules, ....
Nobody thinks cyberspace is a real space, its unreal space, nothing there is real, its all just patterns, a place where geography doesnt matter.
Stupid people ask stupid questions.
Look, this is very simple. We don't even know if THIS universe is a computer simulation. (See arXiv for constraints.) If this universe is a simulation, it is by definition a cyberspace. If cyberspace does not exist, then no law governing anything within this universe is possible.
Since laws governing this universe are possible, one of the statements in that chain must be false. The one most likely to be false is that cyberspace does not exist.
If cyberspace is true, then it is just as possible to establish laws in cyberspace.
However, and this is the incredibly annoying part, the assumption by the original article was that you couldn't have cyberlaws AND laws within nations. The cables have a physical location AND a logical location, and therefore must be subject to laws in both.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Is that Lind, along with an entire generation fails to understand the term space and even more so, cyberspace. Cyberspace does not denote a space anymore than Hilbert Space, or Zeitgeist denotes ghosts. I recommend that Lind pick up a damn book and learn a thing or two before posting another idiotc, poorly researched and politically motivated rant.
Dice.com is stupid.
The author's point seems to be that we cannot treat cyberspace as a proprietary system, such as the rain forest or a (somehow) newly discovered piece of land, which is valid. However, to suggest that cyberspace and faxspace are the same thing is no less absurd than claiming it's the same as the rain forest. Cyberspace has many meanings and usages, but in terms of laws, cyberspace is a very real place. Fundamentally different types of communication, trade, and crime occur over the internet, ones which do not have analogues in the physical world and are best handled as separate systems. The best analogue I can think of, international waters, is still a poor comparison since no one owns them yet everyone (or at least a lot of people) own cyberspace. Lastly, a matter which few people who write opinion pieces (on either side of any issue) like to point out is that everything is relative and the best solution is typically somewhere in the middle. A completely unregulated, unsupervised cyberspace with no aid from any formal body is the goal of (nearly) no one. Similarly, I've not heard anyone propose a system that has more layers of red tape than a North Korean Department of Motor Vehicles.
Technically -- this is /. right? -- the answer is no for the same reason that we can measure the "weight of the internet." There is actual space that this electricity travels through. There is weight, and there is volume.
As far as what the article is really getting it, I've always thought it was dumb that people can own such things. People can own land, water, and air. Back in the day, you could actually just live in the woods if you wanted to. Now, you'd be arrested because it's either owned by the government as a park, owned by a corporation, or owned by a citizen of your country. Even parts of outer space itself are owned. You can't orbit your satellite in the same space as other countries' satellite at the same time as their satellite, else they'll probably send you a declaration of war after you crash their GPS/TV/radio/surveillance/etc. In the future, I'm sure dark matter, black holes, and even whole galaxies will be "owned."
The G
Stop saying we really exists. We are all just a hologram on a 2 dimensional plane very very far away.
Cyberspace is real because we think it is and so is our physical world. You cannot prove reality, so Cyberspace is real if you think it is.
However in speech, it's a metaphor and if these metaphors confuse our lawmakers we should get new lawmakers.
When laws are involved the government usually oversteps their bounds anyway.
Ask yourself a question:
Would the benefits of the governance of the internet outweigh the costs?
I believe the costs outweigh the benefits, but that has nothing to do with the reality of cyberspace, so let's focus on something that actually matters like the state spying on us.
The physical embodiment of "Cyberspace" --- its computers, wires, and people --- is indeed, as Lind suggests, irrevocably bound to the material conditions of this world. To suppose otherwise; that Cyberspace offers some magical escape from the existing orders of our lives or from whatever powers control our cables and our bodies; is naive.
The idea of "Cyberspace," however --- the projection of human yearnings for a different order to the cosmos --- is far from fictional. Lind and fellow defenders of the status quo want to sleight us of the ability to even dream of other worlds outside the grim reality of our own. So long as the idea of Cyberspace remains chained to the physical material of Cyberspace, it will be trampled under the same heels that oppress all other material reality. But, turn those ideas outward to engage change in the world --- forget about freeing computers from the corporatocracy, but strive rather to free your neighbor --- and perhaps someday an emancipated Cyberspace can flourish in an emancipated world.
Mod parent up!
I agree, and I have tried to simplify my explanation of this concept for years. I started in database management and telecom and I use to be a computer design prof.
"Somebody else's computer" is exactly what is happening. The 'internet' is a system of networked (or 'internetworked') computers. The internet allows the computers to communicate information.
I always understood networked computers as just a really, really big mainframe spread across rooms in different cities. It helped with learning network engineering alot...but thinking my way makes you hate the way things like CSS work.
Thank you Dave Raggett
I have been saying this for decades. Yes, since even before the internet became popular. Since I was dialing up at 300 baud on a pay-phone in the barracks to get on bulletin boards with my TRS-80 Model 100. The internet is nothing more than a means of communication. Did people claim to be doing things in "phone space" when they first started using the telephone? (And they did some pretty interesting things with phones, like pipe concerts to whole towns at once.) Did people claim to be doing things in "Paper Space" when they first started writing letters back and forth? What about "telegraph space" or "radio space"? Seriously?
When you order something "in cyberspace" it is nothing more than another way to do mail order. Easier and faster, yes. But fundamentally no different. If you insult someone "in cyberspace" it is no different from picking up a party-line-telephone and cussing at whoever happens to be talking at the time. You are still insulting a real freaking person.
All the same laws should apply and DO apply. Pretending that "cyberspace" is an entirely different realm is just marketing speak made up by techno-hippies who wanted to get away with breaking the law. Now, a lot of the existing laws may suck. But claiming to be "in cyberspace" doesn't get you away from the suckyness. It just lets you pretend and rationalize until someone comes knocking on your very real door.
Just a bit useless, like the words people say about reality when they don't have nothing on their mind but shit and stuff. I call my excess wordage, cyberbullshit and cyberspace is an extension of this bullshit to be envisioned as a great big plane of bullshit that has been flattened to look like a 2D space where cartoon like char dance and play around.
Once, I wondered across a world in this bullshit land in a sci-fi universe of a game. It was real cute bullshit gameplay but bullshit nevertheless. At the end of the boundaries between the worlds, I hit the end of the graphics and fell off the planet's edge. After that, I was underimpressed with the game and returned it for a full refund plus s&h on Ebay.
I was in happy bullshit land for awhile and cyberspace sprang out before me, pucking itself to life like some type of grey goo but only it wasn't alive or real or even that dynamic because all it was was the art of some designer who liked to program video games. But it was on my computer and that counted for a lot of shit man.
If cyberspace isnt a place anymore, then where do I get off this super highway at now?
Call it an osi stack and be done with it
Lind treats countries and legal jurisdictions as "real," but says "there is no such place as cyberspace." It's a specious argument. A space is not the same as a place. I don't think mathematicians confuse the spaces they talk about with places. Geographer Manuel Castells, in his influential book series The Information Age, wrote about the conflict between "space of flows" - of networked finance, data and communication - and contrasted it with the "space of places" - physical locations where people live.
To be fair, Lind seems to be arguing tha cyberspace is not like a physical territory. The metaphor of cyberspace, by implying that it is, supports misleading conclusions. This is a reasonable argument. Metaphors are useful for description, but they are not predictive - though many people, journalists among them, take them too far. Lind is right that governments already have jursidiction over people acting on the Internet, though as others Slashdot commenters point out the Internet has raised numerous jurisdictional questions. However, we could not name or understand anything new if we did not compare it with something already known. I don't think the imperfection of a metaphor is sufficient grounds for discarding it.
But the motivation of the argument, it seems to me, is political. He writes: "it makes no sense to say that California and the U.S. are extending their jurisdiction 'into' cyberspace . . . The idea that corporations are 'invading' a mythical Oz-like kingdom called cyberspace is . . . dopey." I don't know about that. Scholars often use the language of colonization in cases like this. We could talk about government "invasion" into private or family space. Canada's then-justice minister Pierre Trudeau used a spatial metaphor when he said in 1967, upon the introduction of a bill to decriminalize homosexuality, "there's no place for the state in the bedrooms of the nation."
He takes it for granted that these comparisons are reasonable. I don't think they are. I don't hear anyone talking about a "fax" community or a "telephone" community. But people do talk about an "Internet community," an "Internet generation" (more questionable in my mind) - even of belonging to an online "tribe". The Aaron Swartz memorial site is full of such statements. Note also the big-I: the Internet is a proper noun (even he spells it that way).
Benedict Anderson wrote Imagined Communities about the formation of new nations, such as Indonesia, following decolonization. He explains how arbitrary colonial lines drawn on a map gave rise to real feelings of national identity among people who did not know each other: but who had a sense that they had shared histories and experiences. I think the Internet has produced some similar feelings. I don't think Lind's argument is entirely clear, but it seems to me this is what he is really arguing against. But that's a judgment of what should be. Disguising it as an objective description of the Internet is problematic.
Or hey, just read China Mieville's The City and the City.
You first-posted yourself some karma, Mitreya (at least for a moment), but as long as you use readily use similar devices, like "deskspace" and "screen real estate" and "folders" and "directory trees", you might want to reflect a little more before you say something as ridiculous as "the concept of "Cyberspace" is quite stupid". It's no less a troll than "people who use perl are stupid". Worse, I'll hazard a guess that you use the term "the Cloud" several times a day [note: I'm profiling here]
Now, if you want to say, as the writer of the Salon article at least tried to say, that "people have used the concept of "Cyberspace" in stupid ways", that might at least be a little bit defensible (if you gave sufficient evidence).
Where's mod points when you need it?
The concept of a "space" is widely used in many science disciplines, especially on the more abstract concepts, e.g. phase space, Hilbert space, address space, etc. But of course, any fool can use them in stupid ways such as writing fictions where people "enter" them (anyone who knew what a phase space is will see how silly it is to say it can be "entered", double bonus for quoting a novel with people entering an address space).
The concept of "Cyberspace" is no different. We mentally used that concept of a "space" every time we used the term "log in" or "log out" of a remote system. We talked about "going" from one node/server to another in online games, have terms like "server hopping", or even the most common usage of "surfing the web" (yuck!). All of them used the metaphor of a "space" to refer to computers connected to a network.
The concept of a space is not stupid, it is how people used it that is stupid.
Oliver.
I have a situation going on right now in which the concept of "cyberspace" is certainly a useful concept. Trademark law says that someone operating "Joe's Taco Stop" in Miami can stop competing taco places from using the same name in Miami. They can't generally, stop someone from using the same name in California. The theory is, in a different place consumers wouldn't be confused thinking that "Joe's Taco Stop" in LA is the same restaurant they liked in Miami.
I've been selling MyBrand software online, in web forums, since 1994. Is it okay for a competitor to steal my name and sell similar software in the same "places" - the same web forums? I would say that I wasn't selling my software only in Texas, where I happen to live. I was selling it in "cyberspace" and a new competitor shouldn't be allowed to put my name on their product and sell it in the same forums, the same neighborhoods of cyberspace. (They can certainly compete, that's okay, they just can't steal my name to do so ) In this case, I think not only does the idea of cyberspace make sense, but the idea of "neighborhoods" in cyberspace where my brand name is associated with my product makes sense.
Classical objects can be thought to move along trajectories in "phase space," though one of the components, momentum, does not physically reside somewhere in the sense that spatial coordinates do...
Quantum systems can be imagined as moving through a state space that has many more than three independent axes.
Cyberspace might be conceived as the state space for all of the the interconnected memory locations that form the internet. Spatially separate memory locations can nonetheless be tied to each other by physical connections. There are rules that govern how the state space of the internet evolves.
A chessboard is a state space (the location and identity of the pieces and empty spaces at a given "turn"). There are rules that govern the possible ways in which this state space can evolve with "moves"/increments of turns).
Mathematical spaces are conceptual abstract object/constructions that have certain properties, some of which correspond to the 3-D Euclidean space we typically imagine ourselves to exist and move about in. Cyberspace seems like it could be "rigorized" into a somewhat useful abstraction for the states of all the computing devices that form the internet. It's a bit like saying other useful abstractions, say numbers, are to be despised as "not real".
Another make the way it works in your face not something mysterious like space.
I think that for a time "cyberspace" really was a different realm. It was not a commercial venture in the early days; it was more like a research project that escaped the bounds of academia and the military. The .com TLD was vastly outnumbered by .edu and .mil. The first commercial Usenet spam provoked alarm and outrage, and the first advertising banners on the Web were seen as an unwelcome exploitation of a public resource. Due to its immediacy, richness, interconnectedness, and interactive nature, it really did feel like a separate "space" back then, as opposed to paper, telegraph, or radio.
The posted article comes across as a diatribe by an industry frustrated that they haven't completely taken over and owned this new space yet despite over a decade of their best efforts. They probably will eventually anyway, as most pockets of freedom succumb, so the tone of the article seems strangely vindictive. Yet I and others still entertain a nostalgia for the original dream of an open, creative, peer-to-peer interconnected network unmediated by the demands of profit-hungry corporations focused on monetizing their intellectual property and all the personal data they can scoop up and sell to marketers and advertisers.
I support the efforts of organizations such as the EFF and encourage others to do so as well. It's not often that a frontiers like the Web and Internet open up in one's lifetime, and it would be a shame for it to devolve into a slightly better version of the cable TV system.
I'm sorry... this is a question? Slashdot has gone from approximately the level of Enterprise (meh...) to Scooby Doo (oh god, not another song montage... with a stupid dog in the mix...)
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I drank what?
If the concept of cyberspace is stupid, so is the concept of political boundaries. Both are merely hypothetical concepts devised by men.
There are useful hypothetical concepts and harmful ones, and everything in between. To think that a claim about a specific hypothetical concept applies to them all is arse-about thinking, a logical fallacy known as arguing from the specific to the general.
The author of the article is a moron
I think that's unlikely, but if he is, he has some company.
It is not more stupid than the concept of country.
These are social concepts, referring to things that we build collectively, according social conventions.
Exactly! The US Air Force recently changed thier stated mission per Wikipedia to:
"The stated mission of the USAF today is to "fly, fight, and win in air, space, and cyberspace"
They made it a "thing" whether we like it or not and the people with the bombs call the shots!
Yes, the concept is stupid, but so are you. It's a metaphor, and a useful one.
The President tonight said something I found worrisome. He said that we should all be very afraid of cyber threats, but don't worry, the government is going to intervene to protect us.
The best way to take control of something is to make people afraid of it, and then tell them you will protect them from it. Why does the government want to control cyberspace? (Michael Lind might not think it's a real place, but the President does.) WikiLeaks comes to mind. So does the W3C, former paragon of openness, pushing to include DRM in it's specifications. We have a bought and paid for government, and the open internet is a threat to the very lucrative business of proprietary computing. I wouldn't be the least surprised if we started seeing warnings about 'hackers' who 'take advantage' of 'open' systems etc. Paranoid? Perhaps - time will tell. But paranoid or not, I'm not happy about more government involvement in technology, except to promote open standards.
Cyberspace was created, developed, or fashioned, around 1878. It was the telephone, and when people could use it to project their presence in real time, cyberspace was a thing, concept, or result.
As if you didn't know that already. The Internet was initially not even real-time for human communications. E-mail predates the Internet we think of anyways. Nothing you think you know is that simple.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
then you know cyberspace is bullshit.
If you argue that you that patenting "selling shoes on the internet" is stupid, then you're just a self-serving hypocrite when you argue that being and abusive misogynistic asshole on the internet does NOT mean you are an abusive misogynistic asshole, period.
I hear "I'm not sexist, grow a thicker skin, thin, you bitch, this is the internet" from the same people who say "on the internet" is NOT an excuse for things that affect THEM adversely.
If "Cyberspace" is a different world, then so is "postal space" and "cursive-writing space."
This space available.
Does the notion of cyberspace make the debate over its governance less fruitful?
This question presupposes the the notion of cyberspace as a place.
But there are enough morons around to keep that particular stupidity alive...
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Cyberspace may not be real, but neither are many things that we take seriously everyday. Fashion, money, social status, the financial market, rock music are all examples of things that have no real existence outside of our mind's perceptions.
Does not mean that simply ignoring it will be useful in any way.
Dry land does exist! I've seen it!
That article looks like little more then the author promoting himself by taking a provocative viewpoint and using some pretty flimsy evidence to justify it. Ultimately the existence or otherwise of Cyberspace is in the hands of everyone who uses a computer. If we the human component choose to believe in Cyberspace because it somehow enhances our life or makes it easier to understand then why should we deny it? There are plenty of other far more abstract concepts I could attempt to disprove and ridicule.
It's the latest war we are facing how many times have we been handed that line already?
So we must have a "space" to defend. Aren't we tired of fighting wars yet?
Sell sell sell buy buy buy. We need 50,000 young defenders etc.
Who started the STUXNET anyway? We are real proud of what we don't say publicly.
And so afraid it might bite us in the arse someday.
SAD thing fear.
"Some ideas make you dumber the moment you learn of them". This is pretty much the precise definition of an ignorant's views on knowledge.
Oh, the beautiful gloss of greality!
It's a metaphor...with a silly name.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
What's going to happen is some Internet Hitler is going to demand "Cyberraum" and take it from others. "Today, the Internet, Tomorrow the Cloud!"
Tracy Johnson
Old fashioned text games hosted below:
http://empire.openmpe.com/
BT
It turns out that my concept of "cyberspace" does not cause me to stop thinking logically about any of the issues mentioned.
But perhaps that's because I have a clear understanding of those other issues.
Instead of blaming the word "cyberspace", it might be more productive to put the blame where it belongs.
Perhaps it's not the concept of cyberspace that is "stupid" -- but instead it's certain people who use the word "cyberspace" who are stupid.
I think the concept of "cyberspace" is potentially useful -- it's a quick way of referring to a lot of related things and ideas, and hence it cannot possibly be precise. Perhaps it's that lack of precision that is causing some people to view the concept as "stupid"?
"...governance less fruitful?" I would need an example of "fruitful" in order to make a comparison.
Cyberspace is a stupid cinema-friendly name, but no: The philosophical question of the importance of borders and governmental juris-my-diction is absolutely essential to the growth of the human race. It's good that we think of computer networks it as different places because the place is not inside the computer, it's in our heads. The place where you were born, Texas for example, is also a place in your head. Your only experience of Texas is from neural stimuli interpreted by your brain. The physical place we call Texas travels at thousands of miles per hour through space on a planet rotating at thousands of miles per hour, the ground is constantly in motion and is made up by tiny granules of dust that may have been dropped by rain from the other side of the globe. Therefore, it can be said that Texas is only as real as Tron City, and we are organisms who are just finally crawling out of the 'primordial goo' of thinking that reality is only what is solid and that the world is static.
If you think of it as being another physical location, then yes it's stupid. If you think of it as having a level of reality that can be mapped into a visual metaphor where in your metaphor you can hurl a ball of fire at a server and destory the server, then yes, it's stupid.
But viewing it as a set of constraints in a parallel universe makes sense.
E.g. On Planet Earth we have a distance function. Give me two locations, and I can tell you the great circle distance between them. A different distance function will give you one of several highway routes beween them.
In Cyber earth there is also a distance function. Generally called ''latency' Physically I live 50 miles from the University of Alberta. But the U of A is 750 ms from me. My local library, 10 km from here is only 35 ms from the U of A.
So Cyber Earth has a very different 'geography' Places that have much longer latency can be visualized as being on high mountain tops. Cyber Earth looks much like a spiny sea urchin with most of the space being very high 700 ms plateaus on a 40 ms diameter sphere.
There are entire transactions that can take place digitally e.g. you buy a digital song with digital representations of cash. Similarly the people I know as online personalities that I've neer meant. In that sense, cyber space is reality.
Also, that bits can move across borders mostly without impediment, creating confusion about jurisdiction when a crime has been committed, that lends some sense of reality to cyber space. (Dammit, it didn't happen here. I happened in Cyberspace)
Third Career: Tree Farmer Second Career: Computer Geek First Career: Teacher, Outdoor Instructor, Photographer.
...but thats OK, jus because someone has the time to register and make up some silly name does not, in fact, make him any more relevant than the anonymous coward. However it does fit because I am anonymous, and at heart a coward. Dark lights and fitted sheets freak me out!
Anyway the point I am writing about relates to the phrase cyberspace does not exist. Well "I think therefore I'm spam" has been changed quite substantially with existentialism and remodelled by John Paul Sartre to be "I spam therefore I can think". Obviously in Lind's case he hasn't made the transformation and remains spam, and the never the two can fry.
I think!
I just don't know, you know. There seems to be alot of noise in here.
The 'reality' that surrounds us is taken in through the limited senses we have (we frail creatures, can't even see radar or thermal emissions) - and registered in our consciousness inside our brain, perhaps without full fidelity at all times.
Therefore, everything we perceive as 'reality' could arguably be unreal when compared to video of the same senses. Imagination has a strong influence on what we perceive (ask 10 different witnesses to a crime to report what they saw, and you'll get 10 different realities - even though they were observing the same event), as well as conditions that trick our senses (mirages and slight of hand).
Is cyberspace real? As real as anything else we take in through our senses, and think we know about the world around us.
Computer networks are not just about communications - like radio or telephone systems - but the computers in that network allow for persistence within the confines of unique addresses on the packet switched network. Persistence allows the formation of virtual spaces at these network locations - that can be as simple as a threaded message board, where conversations can form a complex web of shared history and culture, to more complex forms including 3D multimedia simulations that mimic space as perceived by humans in the 'real' world - in both places were multiple participants can form community. To the participants in these virtual spaces - it holds as much importance as other spaces within their lives - perhaps more so with the demise of the public spaces - the local bars, parks and so on that formed a 'third space' (first being home, and second being work) who's easy access was lost with the advent of suburbs and the fast food drive-through (borrowing heavily from ideas put down in Howard Rheingold's "The Virtual Community - Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier").
These virtual spaces allow people to quickly find like minded people, form alliances, and get things done. These spaces have significance - they can spill over into the real world - such as the 'Arab Spring', and change the face of countries and the world. They can also be misused and lead to group-think, and victimization of its members (ask Mante Teo about that - or your local Troll).
The value of cyberspace outweighs the desire of lawyers, regulators and governments to find simple answers to complex issues.
Lodragan Draoidh
The more you explain it, the more I don't understand it. - Mark Twain