IN THE 1960s, LSD and free love were supposed to revolutionise the world. In the 1990s it was the Internet. Taxes, petty local laws, censorship, geographical borders, even the nation state itself—all would in time dissolve in the face of this crazy new infrastructure that was everywhere and nowhere and belonged to everyone and no one. “Governments of the industrial world,” wrote one Web activist in his 1996 Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, “you have no moral right to rule us, nor do you possess any methods of enforcement we have true reason to fear.”
Well, the cyber-hippy…
