Reenvisioning the Internet: Embrace Its Multiplicity - Mimi Onuoha
▻https://walkerart.org/magazine/soundboard-reenvisioning-internet-mimi-onuoha
as a teenager, I was so puzzled when I first read John
If artists want to reimagine the web, we must set aside the tendency to subscribe to a universal “us” that is blank, neutral, and anonymous (a.k.a white, Western, and tech-literate).
Perry Barlow’s 1995 “Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace.” Barlow declared cyberspace independent from governments, economic power, military force, race, property, identity, and movement. But the experiences I had online were as much as about the distance the medium provided as the intimacy it enabled with each other. In fact, the two were intertwined: My web friends and I were never bodiless atoms, divorced from reality. It was our histories, our cultures, our interests, and our identities that tied us together in the first place. Whereas Barlow wrote: “We are creating a world where anyone, anywhere may express his or her beliefs, no matter how singular, without fear of being coerced into silence or conformity,” we might have said, “We have created a world just for the six of us, where we feel safe expressing the things we would not speak elsewhere.”