China 
Africa 
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Games, play and playfulness in the creative city
Published in Dale Leorke, Marcus Owens, Games and Play in the Creative, Smart and Ecological City, 2020
This economic transformation was spurred by a growing recognition of the importance of physical space in the networked, digital era. The rise of the commercial Internet in the 1990s was informed and subsequently accompanied by utopian visions of an immaterial cyberspace that would be separate from the physical world and beyond the reach of government and corporate hegemonies. John Perry Barlow’s ‘A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace’ (1996) exemplifies this utopianism, but it also pervaded popular culture texts, mainstream commentary and academic and policy discourse (Kücklich, 2009, p. 341; see also Chun, 2006; Mosco, 2005; Varnelis & Friedberg, 2008). Such visions were quickly countered by a wave of academic scholarship that pointed out the imbrication of ‘cyberspace’ and the global digital economy in material spaces and conditions (see Castells, 1996; McCullough, 2004; Sassen, 1991). These accounts identified the embeddedness of the immaterial cyberspace that the digital economy hinged on in material infrastructure (cables, servers, GPS satellites), economies and social conditions. In the process, they highlighted a growing disjuncture between these two realms, demonstrating how the digital economy privileged a select few ‘global cities’: highly networked and characterised by worker mobility and by the clustering of specialised talent and firms that manage global financial transactions.
The Internet
Published in Gabriele Balbi, Paolo Magaudda, A History of Digital Media, 2018
Gabriele Balbi, Paolo Magaudda
This also implied recognizing that cyberspace is simply integrated into and part of everyday life, a concept with its own historicity. From a political economy perspective, in the 1990s cyberspace was considered a fully separated space, which governments could not control. The most telling formulation of this ideology was probably A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace written by John Perry Barlow in Davos, Switzerland, in 1996. In a significant extract Barlow argued thus: 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. […] I declare the global social space we are building to be naturally independent of the tyrannies you seek to impose on us. You have no moral right to rule us nor do you possess any methods of enforcement we have true reason to fear. […] Cyberspace does not lie within your borders. Do not think that you can build it, as though it were a public construction project. You cannot. It is an act of nature and it grows itself through our collective actions. […] In China, Germany, France, Russia, Singapore, Italy and the United States, you are trying to ward off the virus of liberty by erecting guard posts at the frontiers of Cyberspace. These may keep out the contagion for a small time, but they will not work in a world that will soon be blanketed in bit-bearing media.(Barlow, 1996)
Towards a Terrestrial Internet: re-imagining digital networks from the ground up
Published in Tapuya: Latin American Science, Technology and Society, 2022
Marcela Suárez Estrada, Sebastián Lehuedé
The articles of this Cluster delve into a particular but nonetheless urgent aspect surrounding the internet – how is that different actors imagine the relationship between the earthly, material, and concrete territories and the internet, including the latter’s data, cables, algorithms, and other components. Merely posing this question already constitutes a significant move. In the sixties, the group of technologists from the West Coast of the United States who envisaged the internet imagined it as belonging to a “cyber” or “virtual” realm detached from the rules governing the physical world. As John Perry Barlow’s famous Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace states: “Cyberspace consists of transactions, relationships, and thought itself … Ours is a world that is both everywhere and nowhere, but it is not where bodies live” (Barlow 1996, para 6a). Such a vision still informs internet imaginaries up to this day. While “the cloud” suggests a sublime space of data storage and processing (Mosco 2014), “Artificial Intelligence” directs the discussion to abstract questions about humane and robotic ways of thinking (Ricaurte 2022).