> I feel sad for the 20-year-old me who really believed in the declaration of the independence of cyberspace.

Cyberspace depends on physical reality and everything that comes from that. Resource constraints, economics, politics, arms races, warfare, etc.

Its most horrifying if you look at what it usually burns down and fizzles out to. Governments in the middle east- one dominant family, extracting, the rest suffering in silence boxed away in silos, with no chance to move and create ever again - well except for unrest and fundamentalist movements.

This reads as very naive now. As soon as a critical mass of people got online, and they wanted their governments to apply laws and regulations there, it was going to happen.

This declaration was written from the days when those who were interacting online were making a real effort to do so, who really wanted to be there, who were in a niche, who were observing 'netiquette' and other quaint notions. They were generally educated, generally technologists by profession or interest, and in those circumstances it's easy to see the utopia you have created and declare it good, with no need for regulation.

It's a little like when you have a small team of skilled, motivated engineers - work gets done to a high standard without the need for onerous processes. But when you start recruiting and growing the team wider, and bring in lots of juniors...

> We will create a civilization of the Mind in Cyberspace. May it be more humane and fair than the world your governments have made before.

That didn't turn out so well IMHO. People got on there and then ... yuck, they did people stuff. Harassed each other, commited fraud, blackmail and extortion, created and exchanged CSAM. Cyberspace has suffered from government and commercial overreach, certainly, and so much regulation has been commercial in nature rather than actually about safety.

But the dream of an internet free from any form of government regulation? Never could have lasted when everyone got on here.

And just look at our civilisation of the mind, in its centralised fortresses with its own aristocracy exerting control over what information gets fed to the masses.

And even on a technical level, in 1996 people still used to leave mail relays open to be neighbourly!

Such an idea never made any real sense, and never will until you can figure out how to move IT infrastructure into a separate dimension where governments have no authority. Those servers have to sit somewhere.