To me, the physical world is a realm permitted only to those with wealth. The author beautifully romanticizes the evaporation of tangible labor, but the physical labor I actually experienced meant unpaid, stolen wages. It meant working through the night, dozing off on the early morning subway until the very last stop, and enduring endless contempt, humiliation, and the toxic community that came with it.
I sought a new community in cyberspace, and the world claims that this space rewards you. But looking at it now, that structure also seems reserved for a very specific class. Especially with the advent of AI, it feels like the time I had left to learn and actually build something has run out.
Cyberspace, which I chose as an escape, is ultimately dominated by real-world capital. And if you want to catch up to the early settlers, there isn't much you can do as a citizen of the Third World. Between China's self-sustaining ecosystem and America's global standard, there is no place for me. The physical frontier is closed, and I arrived too late even for the cyber frontier.
Language barriers, capital, platforms—they form just another rigid hierarchy. To enter the open-source world, someone from the periphery must learn English, assimilate into its cultural nuances, and master programming languages that are inherently far more difficult to learn if your native tongue is not English. There are countless more gates to pass through, yet the seats are strictly limited.
This essay spoke of a free and open frontier, but for someone like me, it is merely standing outside a shining castle, longing for it, shouting for someone to open the gates. But I do not possess the skills that the people inside that castle desire and admire.
I have merely migrated from a physical colony to a digital one. How much longer can I be consumed like this?
Sometimes, the inside of that castle—as seen on HN—looks so warm.
But my reality is always cold.
I simply envy those who were privileged enough to experience the 90s cyber-romanticism portrayed in this essay.
My guess (and hope) is that next generations will find more meaning in physical labor, communal living etc, partly out of necessity (what young person can afford to buy even a small, simple home these days?) but mostly because they seem to understand that we've screwed the environment enough at this point and the novelty with things like social media is beginning to wear off. As much as kids are glued to their iPads, they also seem to understand that what we are doing to the environment is not sustainable and that unchecked capitalism is not as great as it is hyped to be.
We already see things like tiny house movement taking off (lots of young people even building these tiny homes themselves). As older farmers retire/die, now is a good time for younger folks to get into farming, even if it is too damn hard these days for small farmers.
I'm writing this from East Asia, not the US. Over here, there is a suffocating cultural expectation: if you aren't in a specific tier of jobs by a certain age, you are branded a loser. Furthermore, the economy is so heavily centralized that there are very few tech jobs outside of Seoul. I tried to make it there, but after being heavily scammed, I had no choice but to return to my rural hometown.
My English is also a constant work in progress. I depend on standard Google Translate for about 30~40% of what I communicate. For now, I'm making ends meet by doing Upwork job via an agency. It's an uphill battle, but I am determined to push myself to study more by reading English tech articles moving forward
> Especially with the advent of AI, it feels like the time I had left to learn and actually build something has run out.
Why? Just go build stuff! AI makes an excellent tutor assuming you can exhibit a bit of self awareness and ask directed questions.
> yet the seats are strictly limited.
Why do you say that?
> But I do not possess the skills that the people inside that castle desire and admire.
I appreciate the seemingly unfair added difficulty of integrating as a foreigner. But as far as not possessing the desired skills, what's preventing you from learning them on your own?
Thank you for your encouragement, and I know it's sincere.
In a purely technical sense, if you have the resources, AI is an good tutor
I'm constantly astonished by it myself.
However, the difficult part about what you said is this
before AI, even relatively simple tasks carried a certain cost. But with the introduction of AI, that cost has actually gone up. And honestly, what shocked me when I first encountered AI was that the code it introduced was several orders of magnitude more impressive than anything I had access to in my environment.
Of course,
I'm not saying I was diligently studying open source code before that.
The environments where I primarily studied were centered around old books like Effective C++ or EIP.
My skills themselves were outdated, and the code I was commissioned to work on in Korea and Japan was also built on very lagcy technology. The kind where everything is crammed into a single PHP view, or where a WinForm application controls everything through one global singleton—essentially procedural programming and heavyweight coding.
But with the introduction of AI, surviving on these so-called legacy technologies suddenly became drastically more difficult. The problem was, most of the documentation I could access was this outdated. It's not that I delayed my studies, either. For instance, I knew Redis was released in 2009, but the first time I actually used it was in 2020. The gap between America and the non-American world is that vast.
So, learning modern coding techniques actually took quite a long time. Patterns like the event bus pattern, which I'm familiar with now, and other specific patterns. So I'm not denying your goodwill—as you said, I am taking on my own challenges.
It's just that AI has been a field of shock, making me realize just how narrow my world was and how terribly inadequate my coding skills are. And to close that skill gap, I'm reading HN.
He's describing my great grandmother's childhood in territorial Arizona, down to the riding a horse to a one-room school house. Her family were all tough ranchers living a lifestyle most of us can't really comprehend.
I think this was written in 1994 for this conference https://seclists.org/interesting-people/1994/Mar/64 , but I'm not 100% sure. It refers to "last summer's coup in the Soviet Union" which may also date it. Maybe it should have a (1994) in the title. Or, I don't know, maybe it's from even earlier? Some of the other pieces have nice dates at the bottom, like the Declaration of Independence for Cyberspace a bit over 30 years ago. EDIT: @karel-3d elsethread seems to think this one is (1998).
It would presumably be the August 1991 coup if it were the Soviet Union, as it was one of the factors leading to the USSR dissolving at the end of the year. The Autumn 1993 coup was in the Russian Federation (and the geriatric plotters in the Kremlin kinda won that one). So 1992?
That's what I thought, too, but the top of the article says "For the Conference on HyperNetworking, Oita, Japan" which was in '94. So, I thought maybe "last summer" was internally even off by a couple years? I'm really not sure, but someone around these parts probably knows. Worth mentioning that also in the early 90s people did refer to the Russian Federation as the Soviet Union sometimes as a shortening of "the former Soviet Union".
The estimate of "The Internet" connecting 800,000 computers is probably also pretty surgically date-identifying (at least to isolate 1992 to 1998 given how fast it was growing at the time, though estimation error might cause a little trouble!). For example, https://web.mit.edu/people/mkgray/net/internet-growth-summar... also suggests 1994 (although that estimate was 0.6 million) while 1992 would be more like 200,000 although as per my scare quotes (and that MIT link) "The Internet" was also a somewhat vague term at the time. And by 1998 it was surely over 10 million which makes the @karel-3d quite likely incorrect, although who knows - maybe that's when the EFF first put it up on their web site?
EDIT: I mostly think it matters since observations that might have seemed quite prescient in 1992 (like also-Mormon Orson Scott Card's even more prescient ideas in 1985 Ender's Game with Locke & Demosthenes political chat personas based on 1980s BBS/UUCP network activity) were very much things everyone was saying by 1998.
His "A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace" was the most unintentionally comical thing I read at the time. Like his lyrics and prose it was woefully pretentious & leaden.
I also met him once. A more unpleasant, up his own ass, person I can barely recall.
Great, anything else nonconstructive to add about the actual article, or you just felt like this was a good moment to try to put down another human for no reason?
Insightful, funny, colorful, visionary in places & not a speck of naivety in sight. Well worth the read.
"(..) tending to favor the creation of small, fast-moving, short-lived adhocracies...digitized hunter-gatherer groups roaming the steppes of Cyberspace."
They're called startups. Or hacker groups, if you will. Not much difference between those 2 imho.
“Here, guns were part of the furniture, and my taciturn neighbors used them on one another with heart-breaking regularity. These domestic killers rarely went to jail, since they could usually remind the jury that the deceased, whom most of the jurors knew, needed killing anyway.”
It’s enjoyable reading, but I realized the author wasn’t to be taken seriously at this point.
"While these electronic thickets may afford the best guerrilla jungle that ever harbored discontents, certain kinds of technological development could render it as flat and barren of hiding places as the salt deserts of the American West."
To me, the physical world is a realm permitted only to those with wealth. The author beautifully romanticizes the evaporation of tangible labor, but the physical labor I actually experienced meant unpaid, stolen wages. It meant working through the night, dozing off on the early morning subway until the very last stop, and enduring endless contempt, humiliation, and the toxic community that came with it.
I sought a new community in cyberspace, and the world claims that this space rewards you. But looking at it now, that structure also seems reserved for a very specific class. Especially with the advent of AI, it feels like the time I had left to learn and actually build something has run out.
Cyberspace, which I chose as an escape, is ultimately dominated by real-world capital. And if you want to catch up to the early settlers, there isn't much you can do as a citizen of the Third World. Between China's self-sustaining ecosystem and America's global standard, there is no place for me. The physical frontier is closed, and I arrived too late even for the cyber frontier.
Language barriers, capital, platforms—they form just another rigid hierarchy. To enter the open-source world, someone from the periphery must learn English, assimilate into its cultural nuances, and master programming languages that are inherently far more difficult to learn if your native tongue is not English. There are countless more gates to pass through, yet the seats are strictly limited.
This essay spoke of a free and open frontier, but for someone like me, it is merely standing outside a shining castle, longing for it, shouting for someone to open the gates. But I do not possess the skills that the people inside that castle desire and admire.
I have merely migrated from a physical colony to a digital one. How much longer can I be consumed like this? Sometimes, the inside of that castle—as seen on HN—looks so warm. But my reality is always cold. I simply envy those who were privileged enough to experience the 90s cyber-romanticism portrayed in this essay.
We already see things like tiny house movement taking off (lots of young people even building these tiny homes themselves). As older farmers retire/die, now is a good time for younger folks to get into farming, even if it is too damn hard these days for small farmers.
And your English seems fine.
90s / early 2000s internet was awesome though.
My English is also a constant work in progress. I depend on standard Google Translate for about 30~40% of what I communicate. For now, I'm making ends meet by doing Upwork job via an agency. It's an uphill battle, but I am determined to push myself to study more by reading English tech articles moving forward
Why? Just go build stuff! AI makes an excellent tutor assuming you can exhibit a bit of self awareness and ask directed questions.
> yet the seats are strictly limited.
Why do you say that?
> But I do not possess the skills that the people inside that castle desire and admire.
I appreciate the seemingly unfair added difficulty of integrating as a foreigner. But as far as not possessing the desired skills, what's preventing you from learning them on your own?
However, the difficult part about what you said is this before AI, even relatively simple tasks carried a certain cost. But with the introduction of AI, that cost has actually gone up. And honestly, what shocked me when I first encountered AI was that the code it introduced was several orders of magnitude more impressive than anything I had access to in my environment.
Of course, I'm not saying I was diligently studying open source code before that. The environments where I primarily studied were centered around old books like Effective C++ or EIP. My skills themselves were outdated, and the code I was commissioned to work on in Korea and Japan was also built on very lagcy technology. The kind where everything is crammed into a single PHP view, or where a WinForm application controls everything through one global singleton—essentially procedural programming and heavyweight coding.
But with the introduction of AI, surviving on these so-called legacy technologies suddenly became drastically more difficult. The problem was, most of the documentation I could access was this outdated. It's not that I delayed my studies, either. For instance, I knew Redis was released in 2009, but the first time I actually used it was in 2020. The gap between America and the non-American world is that vast.
So, learning modern coding techniques actually took quite a long time. Patterns like the event bus pattern, which I'm familiar with now, and other specific patterns. So I'm not denying your goodwill—as you said, I am taking on my own challenges.
It's just that AI has been a field of shock, making me realize just how narrow my world was and how terribly inadequate my coding skills are. And to close that skill gap, I'm reading HN.
The estimate of "The Internet" connecting 800,000 computers is probably also pretty surgically date-identifying (at least to isolate 1992 to 1998 given how fast it was growing at the time, though estimation error might cause a little trouble!). For example, https://web.mit.edu/people/mkgray/net/internet-growth-summar... also suggests 1994 (although that estimate was 0.6 million) while 1992 would be more like 200,000 although as per my scare quotes (and that MIT link) "The Internet" was also a somewhat vague term at the time. And by 1998 it was surely over 10 million which makes the @karel-3d quite likely incorrect, although who knows - maybe that's when the EFF first put it up on their web site?
EDIT: I mostly think it matters since observations that might have seemed quite prescient in 1992 (like also-Mormon Orson Scott Card's even more prescient ideas in 1985 Ender's Game with Locke & Demosthenes political chat personas based on 1980s BBS/UUCP network activity) were very much things everyone was saying by 1998.
edit: earliest web archive crawl is from 1996
https://web.archive.org/web/19961220120042/https://www.eff.o...
so you are probably right with 1994
this hits hard.
hopefully we can start making physical stuff again & teaching kids how to do so.
"(..) tending to favor the creation of small, fast-moving, short-lived adhocracies...digitized hunter-gatherer groups roaming the steppes of Cyberspace."
They're called startups. Or hacker groups, if you will. Not much difference between those 2 imho.
edit: so 1994
It’s enjoyable reading, but I realized the author wasn’t to be taken seriously at this point.