"The Internet treats censorship as a malfunction and routes around it"
About this Quote
Barlow’s line has the breezy certainty of early cyber-utopianism: censorship isn’t framed as a moral battle to be won, but as a technical problem to be solved. That word choice is the trick. “Malfunction” demotes authority from sovereign power to broken machinery, inviting the reader to see gatekeeping as not just illegitimate but inefficient - a bug, not a law. The verb “treats” also matters. It grants the Internet a collective, quasi-organic agency, a swarm intelligence that responds automatically, without needing a single leader or ideology. If the network is the organism, censorship is just a blocked artery; routing is the body’s reflex.
The subtext is Silicon Valley’s favorite fable: code is politics by other means, and architecture is destiny. “Routes around it” borrows the language of packet switching, making resistance sound mundane, almost boring - as if evasion is simply what networks do, like water flowing downhill. That’s a powerful rhetorical move because it reassures: you don’t have to be heroic; you just have to stay connected.
Context sharpens the edge. Barlow was writing out of the 1990s moment when the web still felt like a borderless frontier and the state looked clumsy beside rapidly spreading tools like mirrors, proxies, encryption, and decentralized hosting. The line is also a provocation: if censorship is a “malfunction,” censors become technicians trying to “fix” a system whose core design rejects their job. History has complicated the claim - platforms can centralize control, and states can co-opt infrastructure - but the intent remains: to cast the Internet as an engine of escape velocity, not debate.
The subtext is Silicon Valley’s favorite fable: code is politics by other means, and architecture is destiny. “Routes around it” borrows the language of packet switching, making resistance sound mundane, almost boring - as if evasion is simply what networks do, like water flowing downhill. That’s a powerful rhetorical move because it reassures: you don’t have to be heroic; you just have to stay connected.
Context sharpens the edge. Barlow was writing out of the 1990s moment when the web still felt like a borderless frontier and the state looked clumsy beside rapidly spreading tools like mirrors, proxies, encryption, and decentralized hosting. The line is also a provocation: if censorship is a “malfunction,” censors become technicians trying to “fix” a system whose core design rejects their job. History has complicated the claim - platforms can centralize control, and states can co-opt infrastructure - but the intent remains: to cast the Internet as an engine of escape velocity, not debate.
Quote Details
| Topic | Internet |
|---|---|
| Source | A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace (John Perry Barlow, 1996) — contains the line often rendered as "The Net treats censorship as a malfunction and routes around it." |
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