Él manifestó de Barlow y por qué no funciona

Las utopías no existen.

En el manifiesto de Barlow, el poeta trata de vender al internet como un lugar de libertad pura, nada más lejos de la realidad. Un lugar que le pertenece a las personas, donde las empresas y gobiernos no tienen cabida. Donde los intereses privados brillan por su ausencia.

Es vendido como un deseo, aquí quería ponerlo de lado y pensar que quizá sea ideal, quizá sea bueno para la humanidad. Pero dentro de esta ecuación existe un factor de fracaso inmediato que todos ya conocemos, el ser humano mismo.

De por sí, la persona nace con la idea de vivir en un mundo competitivo, eso hace que exista una malicia direccionada a su competencia. Además de la ya direccionada por algunos entes dada por la locura.

En la maestría vimos temas que no quería mencionar en el video de YouTube, temas como que es un lugar abierto para que un pedófilo haga lo que quiera, que un terrorista ataque un gobierno, y así sucesivamente.

La realidad es cruel, el Internet está podrido. No queda mucho más por decir. Aun así, quería anidar mi ensayo (en inglés) de la maestría de por qué el Manifiesto de Barlow no funciona.

Barlow’s Declaration presented a utopian manifesto of freedom in the early days of the Internet. Besides the optimistic view of the future days, the manifesto didn’t consider people’s malice, private interests, or the true nature of human beings. In this essay I will expose three cases related to cybersecurity that contradict Barlow’s manifesto. The objective is to show that the scenario that Barlow presents will never happen, and the reality is crude,but it is something that we saw in the days that Barlow created the manifesto (1996), and this refutes the idea of it.

Cyber-attacks are more common than the government of Mexico likes to admit. Recently an airportcompany received a cyber-attack in October. Barlow didn’t consider the factor that the first computer virus was created in 1971, this is a clear precedent of incoming dates, and a basic conclusion was and continue being that the Internet is an open gap to cyber-attacks, a cold war between countries, and a place of malice for the people.

A good example of this malice was the recent case of XZ library backdoor attack. In summary, one hacker in China infiltrated in the open-source community and start contributing and making social engineering to get reliability of this community. At the same time, he started contributing to the XZ library repository with suspicious commits that ends in a open backdoor that soon will be released in millions of Linux based computers and servers. The issue was briefly summarized as this but is more than that. The hacker gets the reliability of the original creator of the library and getsproprietary access to freely modify the library and make whatever he wants. The issue never detonates though, because of a geek random person who tested the library and note thousandths differencein time of execution. Then the saver shows that the recent commits were harmer than the community though and without anyone noticing, save the world of one of the biggestcyber-attacks of the century.

This case is a clear standard of how people’s malice refutes Barlow’s manifesto. On the other hand, there are always private and political interests behind the scenes of the use of technology. A good case but not completely related to the Internet was the case of Stuxnet. Stuxnet is a computer virus that looks to infect punctual computers related to nuclear armory in Iran. The goal of the government of United States and Israel was to infect as more machines as possible but only the ones that has certain IP addresses or identified information was the true affected. Then after some time, the virus automatically will be deleted.

In summary, the case exposed shows that the network spaces are an open highway that helps the malice travel. Originally Barlow’s manifesto mentioned that the Internet will not be an open highway for Governments and political parties, but these cases as the same as open source has the liberty to use the network media as freely as a normal person in the exposed circumstances. In the end, Barlow’s manifesto was this in the end, a utopian way to see the world, and in the end naive.

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