As attempts to sanitize the internet and turn it into a unidirectional “walled garden” more like cable TV than a “World Wide Web” have become more common, aggressive, and (thanks to the folly of Man) popular, Heinlein’s observations about frontiers have been going through my mind with greater frequency. The Cliff’s Notes version is: As societies become more “civilized” and rulebound, the kind of restless risk-takers and rulebreakers who drive all societies forward get tired of being harassed by cops and bureaucrats for refusing to conform and leave for the frontier. Once all the freethinkers go, the society they left behind quickly stagnates and becomes infested with onerous laws & “regulations” (and their attendant busybodies). Eventually a few of the amateur iconoclasts and rebel-cosplayers go after the freethinkers, followed by the profiteers and braver rule-followers, then by gradually-increasing numbers of followers and herd-animals until the surplus cops, hall-monitors and bosses from the motherland (and such societies always have a surfeit of such creatures) arrive and start “civilizing” the frontier, and the cycle starts again.
Since we currently have no physical frontiers (and won’t unless space travel becomes both dramatically cheaper and game-changingly faster), the internet became our frontier, and right now the cops and hall-monitors are busily engaged in “civilizing” it. Soon it will be as dreary and fenced-in as any HOA-dominated “community”, and the nonconformists will need to find a new frontier; until they do they will increasingly be labeled “troublemakers” and “criminals” and persecuted accordingly. Unfortunately, societies’ tendency to self-lobotomize into stagnation and decay is something that will almost certainly never be solved; the best we can hope for is that some freethinker of the distant future figures out an ironclad way to ensure that civil rights can never be violated by those who want to “regulate” everything from what people eat and wear, to where they live or travel to, to what they watch and say, to how they fuck and what they think. And then there will be at least one place where people who just want to be left alone to do their own thing can escape from the otherwise-omnipresent busybodies who cannot conceive of the idea of anything that is none of their business.
