The Significance of the Electronic Frontier

This paper draws on the papers of Newt Gingrich, Alvin Toffler, John Perry Barlow, and Esther Dyson to explore the rise and fall of the idea of the “electronic frontier,” arguing that conservative advocacy for the impending communications revolution often strayed far from longstanding cyber-libertarian caricatures. The paper begins in the 1970s, when New Gingrich — then a struggling historian and unsuccessful congressional candidate — worked with Alvin Toffler to build institutional support for “anticipatory democracy” in the federal government, in the hopes of making elected officials more responsive to their constituents. After Gingrich’s election these efforts became central to the bipartisan efforts he spearheaded with Al Gore to bring futurists into the halls of government. Both Gingrich and Toffler, the paper argues, strayed far from laissez-faire approaches to technology policy: Gingrich advocated for massive investments to accelerate technological transitions, and Toffler lampooned the “invisible hand” and sharply criticized Reagan-era deregulatory policies as misguided. When Wyoming rancher and former Grateful Dead lyricist John Perry Barlow became the leading apostle of the electronic frontier in the early 1990s, he pushed the idea in more radical directions, at times arguing that the state could and should not attempt to place restrictions on interactions in virtual spaces. But these arguments were leveraged against specific circumstances, from the hacker crackdown to the Communications Decency Act, and by the turn of the millennium Barlow was becoming deeply disillusioned with right-wing disregard for the scope of corporate power on the internet. At that point tensions between the idea and the lived experience of the “electronic frontier,” as well as fractures in the conservative coalition, led to a precipitous decline in this center-right vision for the future of technology, laying the groundwork for the very different political configurations that arose in the new millennium.