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anti-nation where normal nation-state rules do not apply. This was shaped in part by Free Software pioneers such asRichard Stallman, who created theGNU project in an effort to resist proprietary operating systems, and who is also a principal architect of the copyleft movement. Stallman’s touchstone is the hacker culture of theMassachusetts Institute of Technology in the 1970s, a free-wheeling techno-cooperative mood drawing on the hippie ethos and notions of libertarianism and political anarchism which perhaps bizarrely was underpinned by DARPA. (The word ‘hacker’ is endlessly misapplied. It means, originally, someone with the technological skill to make devices or software. That it subsequently became a synonym for ‘cracker’ – one who unlawfully and sometimes maliciously breaks into someone else’s computer systems – is an irritation to those to whom it more rightly belongs. A ‘good hack’ is an elegant solution to a problem, not a successful intrusion.)
    Stallman famously resisted the introduction of passwords on the system at MIT, and urged fellow users to change theirs to an empty string (i.e. no password at all) to preserve the open culture at the time, and remains a powerful voice of resistance to the corporatization of and governmental interference in the affairs of the Internet. The important point is this: that from the very beginning, the makers of the digital realm saw it as something different, something which would change the world. The Internet has always been – perhaps was created to be – disruptive, to mount a challenge to the conventional norms of behaviourwhich have grown up around the inherited structures of the modern world which derive from the history of the last 400 years.
    But powerful though the influence of figures such as Richard Stallman may be on our understanding of what the digital realm is and how we should act within it – even among those of us who don’t know his name – the notion of a separate space is all the more so. Inadvertently, Gibson, along withSteven Lisberger (writer and director of the original
Tron
, which also came out in 1982) and others who played with the same idea, crystallized the language and the notion of the space behind the screen as another country. That space came to be seen as having very few if any laws, as being outside any country – or perhaps more interestingly in a no-man’s-land between countries – and bound by no jurisdiction. For a long time, courts in many states were unwilling to accept jurisdiction over actions on the Internet; it was unclear where an offence might be taking place and under what law it should be prosecuted.Free speech was assumed, and (notoriously)copyright was seen as void by many users – even if it was understood at all. In the 1993
Time
article,David Farber, then a Professor of Information Science at the University of Pennsylvania, joked toPhilip Elmer-DeWitt that the Internet itself should apply to be recognized by the UN as a state – incidentally providing
Time
with a title: ‘First Nation in Cyberspace’. Almost everyone quoted in the piece – along with the author himself – refers to the Internet as if it were a physical space. Perhaps the most telling description came fromGlee Willis, engineering librarian at the University of Nevada: ‘It’s a family place. It’s a place for perverts. It’s everything rolled into one.’
    This is the first point which needs to be understood in any discussion of digital technology and its influence upon us: for all that it’s almost impossible to discuss the issues of digitization and the adoption of new technology without using the expression, there is no such thing as ‘the digital world’. The metaphor ofspace behind the screen is just that. The Internet is not separate from the physical world we inhabit day to day, it is an expression of it, and of us. All of it – the Internet and theWorld Wide Web, the social media sites they facilitate, the