Being online means being somehow connected to, and interacting with, a network of other people. It's being part of a social group dissimilar from physical social groups: not limited by geographic constraints, but limited by technical constraints.

As for being "free" online, freedom can be associated either to immediate restraints (you cannot do that), or to subsequent consequences (you should not do that). The "spontaneous" and "worldwide" development (or so it seemed) of the internet made the early users feel that there was some ineluctability to the spread of communication, knowledge and information, as illustrated by the motto "information wants to be free". The free production and circulation of information necessitated, however, a readjustment of how we write and read things.

The other component is anonymity. At some point, it was impossible to know who was saying what, and instead of a terrifying nightmare of potential terrorist activity that this would be seen as in the 21st century, this was considered an opportunity to erase all inequalities: race, gender, income, etc. Whenever you're online, the only thing that matters is what you know, and what you say. In practice, however, most of the early internet users were young white males from the US.

The first appearance of the term cyberspace is in William Gibson's sci-fi novel Neuromancer, which had a huge impact on pop culture then, and now (e.g. The Matrix was heavily influenced by the style and world of Neuromancer). In this novel, groups of self-organized individuals, hackers, travel in a digital (yet, three-dimensional) world in order to fight against the oppression of corporations. Cyberspace, then, is first and foremost a fantasy. But this fantasy has roots in deeper, broader dreams: the New Frontier, the communes of the 1960s and early libertarian thinking.

If cyberspace claims to be independant, than independant from what? For Barlow, it's obviously being independent from nation-states, but as we have seen last week, there are different forces at play when it comes to the development of technology: governments are one of them, along with the military and commerce, but there are also two others: academica, and us. This week is going to specifically address the influence of those groups on the development of the internet.

The west coast code acts as law insofar as it is always either allowing or denying a particular state or behaviour. Without code, in the cyberspace, there is nothing; no jurisprudence, only decrees.

The question, then, is not whether or not we can be independent from external forces in cyberspace, but rather how do we actually hold accountable the forces that do.

This idea is further developed by Lawrence Lessig in his book Code Is Law.

The development of the Internet precedes that of the Web by about 20 years. The internet therefore provides the infrastructure to enable the Web, and a lot of other applications (email, file transfer, torrenting, etc.). While the Internet was explicitly funded by the U.S. military, the Web was funded by the CERN, a nuclear research agency in Switzerland.

The Internet was first and foremost the product of research in the field of machine communications: if phone lines weren't good enough for multiplexing (aka many-to-many communication), they needed to find something else. That something else became packet-switching, a technique which enables messages to take multiple, independent routes.

The diagram above is the earliest Internet known, and indicates who (universities: UC Los Angeles, UC Santa Barbara, Stanford Research Institute and University of Utah) is running what kind of computers).

So, this was a broad historical overview, let us now dive deeper into the practicalities of it. It might seem a stretch, but the picture above illustrates quite clearly the influence of knowledge on power and agency.

The same way that lack of information about reproductive health maintains a system of control on those who cannot understand and act upon their own bodies, a lack of knowledge about technical systems makes us more vulnerable to its pitfalls.

The global network has multiple layers. The first one, not mentioned above, is the link layer. The link layer is the set of physical infrastructures which underpin everything else. Aka cables. Those cables are particulary vulnerable to two things: sharks and the NSA.

Then comes IP (where do I go), then TCP (do I still make sense when I'm there), then everything else (what is it that i was trying to say in the first place).

This layer scheme is quite recurrent in digital technology, which often consists on layers of abstractions relying on top of each other (see OSI model )

IP (Internet Protocol) is the set of behaviours which allows to know where a computer is on a network. It is essentially an address system along with a network of roads. In an example of going from A to B, it first defines what it means to be A, and to be B (i.e. it assigns addresses, of the type 127.234.231.9), and then it establishes multiple paths between A and B, by breaking up a given message from A to B and having different parts of that message go through different paths to get to their destination.

The job of TCP, then, is to make sure that, once those packets have gotten to B, none of them are missing, and they can be reliably re-assembled in order to make sense of that message. It does so by structuring the data in a very particular way (see resources for a detailed explanation).

Those two protocols were designed by Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn at UCLA in 1967, and the first packet sent according to these protocols was sent on October 29, 1969. Their message actually crashed the whole network. In contrast, the response to the first message ever sent via the telegram was "What Hath God Wrought?" -quite visionary for the time, courtesy of Graham Bell's daughter.