[meyum33]

I clicked open the link to find Yahoo has gone dark in China since 2021. Doesn’t work even with a VPN. I miss the good old days of the Web.

[geokon]

The chasm between the current tech world's culture and Barlow's "A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace" is really jarring

[dfex]

> "We will create a civilization of the Mind in Cyberspace"

I remember reading this in my mid-teens and it really speaking to me.

Sometimes we tend to forget: nobody is forcing us to use the crap that "the Internet" has become home to.

The Internet isn't the content, it's the network - the map is not the territory and the underlying architecture hasn't changed all that much.

There will always be room to carve out your space and find your people.

[pixl97]

>In 2004, Barlow reflected on his 1990s work, specifically regarding his optimism. His response was that "we all get older and smarter"

Cyberpunk was already a well established genre in 96, if you didn't see what the net was going to turn into you were already high on your own hopium.

[jMyles]

Barlow's vision is alive and well. Go to a Billy Strings show and talk to bluegrass hacker hippies that ride the rail there. Or a good traditional Grateful Dead cover band. Or go to one of the more regen/cypherpunk ethereum events (GFEL, Regens Unite, Schelling Point, etc).

John Perry has tons of fans who came up through his songs and have since connected those dots.

https://justinholmes.bandcamp.com/track/barlows-jig

[monero-xmr]

The cognitive dissonance is stunning. China is a closed system, corrupt, opaque, and doing business there risks being murdered if you don’t grease the right palms. Or if you greased the right palms today, but in 5 years you bribed someone who’s out of favor, could get death.

Chinese business crying foul over simply forcing an app to change owners is the pinnacle of hypocrisy.

[bearjaws]

They even had 4 years to IPO, it's not like the ban was unknown.

[junto]

The irony is not lost on this oldie either. We used to truly be anonymous. No real names. No photos or videos posted online. JavaScript was limited to the wonders of DHTML. Web pages were documents. Everything felt decentralized, as was intended. I really miss those days. Ok, not the under construction animated gifs, but everything else.

[paulryanrogers]

Except for that time browsers used to send your PII along with requests

[nirui]

Funny enough, the very first foreign chat room that I've ever visited was hosted by Yahoo.com. Seeing people on the other side of globe talk shit feels kind magical, through that you reflect and gain idea of improvements, and it shapes your world view with a more complete (good and bad) picture.

Now days we have way more advanced self-media platforms, but each one is just an island of (both platform-imposed and self-imposed) isolation.

[geor9e]

The link is to techcrunch and doesn't mention yahoo. All websites work with VPN in China, as long as the VPN itself isn't blocking them.

[meyum33]

Maybe Yahoo owns TechCrunch. Perhaps they’re detecting access from China based on more than just IP address. Since Yahoo was grilled for handing over dissidents’ info to the Party they really went the extra mile to distance itself from China. They even blocked Engadget from China.