Thirty years ago, at the World Economic Forum in Davos, EFF co-founder John Perry Barlow wrote a “Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace” — a bold claim that the internet would be a place free from old-world control. This year also marks 250 years since the original Declaration of Independence. So did cyberspace actually turn out independent?
A New Declaration For Today
In a new video, privacy educator Naomi Brockwell (NBTV) takes on that question — tracing what “tyranny” meant in 1776, walking through Barlow’s optimistic vision, and then confronting how far today’s digital life sits from that promise. Our devices track us by default. Our data is the product. Independence online isn’t handed to us anymore — it’s something we have to actively choose, every day.
That’s the same idea behind everything we do here at Pretty Simple Privacy. You don’t need a revolution to take back some control — just a handful of pretty simple swaps: a browser that doesn’t watch you, a search engine that doesn’t profile you, email that isn’t mined for ads. Small decisions, repeated daily, add up to something that looks a lot like independence.
Watch: The 1996 Warning We All Ignored — Naomi Brockwell TV
Want the bigger picture on why any of this matters? Read our Why Privacy Matters page.
Follow Naomi Brockwell
Naomi’s work is exactly the kind of independent, non-alarmist privacy education we like to point people toward — we recommend following her directly on Odysee or through her own site, NBTV.media.
Thumbnail: Naomi Brockwell TV, via Odysee