Saw this posted with affectionate respect for its 90s idealism and distress at how things turned out, but I feel a lot of the seeds of the worst internet were in it:
The repudiation of the body (you are not online identies, you are social animals and part of the communities you physically inhabit), the veneration of the market (can’t you imagine different kinds of relationships?), the supposed internationalism that is all USA (Jefferson, de Tocqueville, Brandeis) … https://www.eff.org/cyberspace-independence
Some of it could have been thought past, no doubt. But the illusion of separation of self from flesh is the small-scale version of the fantasy that human society can be treated as separate from the ecosystem in which it evolved - the ideal of cyberspace as transcending the material world on which its servers run, out of which its physical structures are mined and powered - heaven, in other words, and the real only fodder to maintain it.
@CommonMugwort well I think it's best understood in context of a lot of similar social things that it was rejecting.
It wasn't so much a rejection of ecosystem as a rejection of other human created institutions, themselves separate from ecosystem, things like cultures and governments that were themselves leaving ecosystem behind.
If that makes sense.
It was about transcending other institutions that had already transcended the material world.
