Civilization on the electronic frontier

A new era for human thought on the internet

Image by Joro Chen

I. Riding with the cowboy poet

On February 8, 1996, as President Bill Clinton signed the Communications Decency Act into law, John Perry Barlow mounted a resistance. The Wyoming cattle farmer, technologist, and poet published A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, declaring the worldwide web a haven from governments that seek to put constraints on human thought. “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,” he wrote.

Barlow, best known as a lyricist for the Grateful Dead, had believed in the promise of digital technology since the 1980s, when he found that an Apple Macintosh made it easier to run the 22,000-acre ranch on which he had been raised. As an early member of the online bulletin board The WELL, he came to revere the web’s ability to connect minds across space. In 1990 he co-founded the Electronic Frontier Foundation to protect civil liberties in the emerging digital world. The internet, he believed, was a liberating force. He said: “We are in the middle of the most transforming technological event since the capture of fire.”

We’ve since learned to be cynical about the internet. Instead of realizing Barlow’s digital utopia, we followed our naivete on a dark detour, seduced by a new gold rush and captivated by the allure of virality. We may have been entertained and even educated, but we increasingly feel surveilled and manipulated, too.

But Barlow’s early ideals weren’t mere naive illusions. They spoke to something pure and possible. They recognized the transformative power of an interconnected web of minds. Even amid the disappointments of the internet’s evolution, we have seen glimpses of how this new power can be harnessed for good. But it is only now, a full human generation later, that we’re getting to a place where it’s possible to see how Barlow’s dreams—or something close to them—can be realized.

Barlow was a believer, and so are we at Substack. We believe that the internet, supported by an infrastructure that preserves pro-social values, can be of tremendous service to humanity. With the right cultural operating system, the heart of Barlow’s vision can still be realized.

The cowboy poet can ride again.

II. Cognition wants to be free

Barlow was brought into The WELL by Stewart Brand, a founder of the Whole Earth Catalog and another foundational internet believer. As early as 1984, Brand identified the key tension that would come to complicate the hopeful visions of those who, like him, saw computers as a way to expand consciousness.

“On the one hand, information wants to be expensive, because it’s so valuable,” he said at a hackers conference that year. “The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other.”

We’ve been grappling with this tension for 40 years, with unsatisfying results. The information landscape online has come to be dominated by a handful of social media companies that have created a vast network of connected voices. That network has produced a lot of good in the world, but it rests on a foundation—an attention-oriented business model—that too often cheapens, coarsens, and corrodes human connection.

The problem isn’t the flow of content, but what the underlying infrastructure constrains downstream. While freeing information, it has imprisoned cognition. For a full generation, we have been lured into a game that compels us to surrender our agency to algorithms. We don’t go to the library anymore. We just go to the casino. Dopamine is our soma.

And now a new force stands to completely reshape how our minds interact online. The advent of artificial intelligence changes what each of us can do with information at a galactic scale. Today, almost anyone can wield more cognitive power than the old gods ever dreamed of. These powers are spreading across the world at fiber-optic speed, augmenting human thought, and in some cases replacing it. The internet and our minds are becoming awash with chatter as the effective cost of cognition falls toward zero. Cognition wants to be free.

But just as the over-abundance of information has changed the relationship we have with real human communication, a surfeit of cognition puts a premium on real human thought. We want to know that there’s a person on the other side of an idea. We feel less alone when we are regarded by others. When we seek to comfort those we love, we send them our thoughts. The robots may process information in unimaginable volumes, but we people can still hold the agency. Our minds, freely thinking together in cyberspace, can be the ultimate guardians of humanity.

At Substack, we are building tools and a network for real human connection—the infrastructure for cognitive freedom. Here is a meeting place for minds that care for culture. Here is a model that strengthens the bonds of online communities. A technology to help you think again. To reclaim your attention. To take back your mind.

III. The mind in the cloud

Our bodies don’t live on the internet, but, increasingly, our minds do. Much of our communication and discourse now takes place in online spaces that don’t have the designation of states but approximate their power. To a greater extent than ever in human history, we are organizing ourselves into a global culture where ideas pay little heed to borders and outpace our physical realities. This online population deserves better support than what the dominant systems have so far offered. We need civil infrastructure designed to help the collective mind flourish.

The Wild West of John Perry Barlow’s internet is long gone, but we haven’t yet advanced beyond the unruly boomtowns that have cropped up in its wake. The online tools and gathering places of the 1990s—from The WELL to GeoCities—held promise for a democratic (if messy) reimagining of expression and community, but they were ultimately eroded by social media’s more potent organizing model and commercial power. Facebook and TikTok won the attention game and now set the terms for a huge swath of modern culture.

The social giants, though, repeated the patterns of the early internet pioneers—focusing first on building products and audiences and only then worrying about the design of the civil infrastructure that supports them. The entire economic evolution of early social media can thus be summed up in four words: apps first, ethics later. The engineers and designers of the early platforms were so focused on making their products irresistible that they neglected to make them positive-sum.

There have always been winners in these games, of course, but the spoils get concentrated in the hands of the very few—not least, the rulers at the top. This effect comes not from bad intention or greed, but from the original failure to adopt an approach that prioritizes the population’s long-term health above the machine’s short-term financial interests.

The design of such infrastructure is critical, because it sets norms and regulates behaviors. The model, in this sense, is the cultural operating system, embodying a form of government, a political philosophy, and an economy all in one. The social media companies ultimately settled on an attention-focused model that now serves a massive online population that is increasingly rowdy and troubled. But this shortcoming clears the way for a new type of system, more intentionally designed, that promotes better mental hygiene. The conditions are ripe for a model that supports classically liberal values and connects humanity in trust relationships that are strengthened, rather than undermined, by its underlying economic system—even in a time of abundant and artificial cognitive capacity.

Unlike social media, the Substack model isn’t about top-down order or submission to a ruler’s whims. You get to set the terms of the culture you want to live in.

We are building a system that allows order to emerge through facilitating the free flow of information and thought, where people help one another understand the world and feel part of something larger than themselves. Every Substack, shaped by its creators and constituents, can be a community. It’s a model based on ownership and agency, valuing relationships over impressions. It fosters genuine human connection—a way to know and appreciate that there is a person on the other side of an idea.

We are striving to build Substack into a city worthy of the approval of Jane Jacobs, the celebrated author and urbanist. Successful cities, Jacobs said, don’t arise from central planning but from adaptive experimentation. They are living organisms, constantly shaped and reshaped by cooperation, interaction, and intention. “Cities have the capability of providing something for everybody,” Jacobs wrote in The Death and Life of Great American Cities, “only because, and only when, they are created by everybody.”

Not everything in this new city will be perfect. There’ll still be crime, disputes, and traffic jams. But as we have already seen in the early days of Substack—with a population now in the many tens of millions—it can be a place where curiosity pays, and where light can be let

into the discourse. You can be understood here. People who use Substack already know it. The author George Saunders has described it as “social media purified by conscience.” Others have pointed to how Substack feels better and accommodates thoughtful conversation and good-faith disagreement. “There is more room for your ideas to breathe,” says one writer, “leaving more room for them to spread organically.”

In 1996, John Perry Barlow heralded “a world that all may enter without privilege or prejudice accorded by race, economic power, military force, or station of birth.” It was a beautiful vision, but it never found an operating system strong enough to sustain it. And so other ways won. For a while. But here we are, back at the beginning, with new technologies reordering Cyberspace again, wondering what the next era of the interconnected mind will look like.

Now we have an opportunity to realize Barlow’s dreams, by investing in the right system. One that helps us wield new technologies instead of being wielded by them. We can choose to live in a city where the mind can explore freely and work in service of making life better for each other, knowing it makes life better for ourselves. That is the power of human culture at its best. An undeniable force—resilient to disruption, adaptive to great change, and resistant to coercion and conformity. We know how to do this. We’ve been doing it for millions of years.

It’s a civilization, if we want it.