By the early 1990s, the last official barriers to business and commerce on the Internet were torn down through a combination of congressional legislation and new rules from the National Science Foundation, the organization that supported the Internet. The noncommercial status of the Internet was rooted in its history as a government-funded project operating mainly through universities and government agencies, but businesses were persistent in arguing that they belonged online as well. In 1993, the Internet became fully open for business with the passage of the National Information Infrastructure Act, which “clearly took the development of the Internet out of the hands of the government and placed it into the hands of the competitive marketplace.”

More broadly, Barlow was arguing that nothing from the offline world—traditional rules, institutions, and codes of behavior, even history itself—carried any weight in cyberspace, which was “a world that all may enter without privilege or prejudice accorded by race, economic power, military force, or station of birth.” Having ditched America’s living history of racism in less than a sentence, and ignored the misogyny outright, Barlow was then free to demand the familiar absolutist line about online speech. “Anyone, anywhere,” he wrote, “may express his or her beliefs, no matter how singular, without fear of being coerced into silence or conformity.” The declaration is a political statement about as nuanced and considered as the hand-scrawled “Keep Out” sign that a teenager tapes on his door. Nonetheless, it accurately describes much of the Web today—the hostility to authority and rules or regulations of any kind; the privileging of freedom over empathy; the fantasy that the Internet is immune to the pull of history.

In fact, McCarthy and the other early hackers were critical of those who saw the computer revolution as a path to personal wealth or its close cousin, personal power. Even Lou Montulli recalls being taken aback by the promise of a quick fortune from Jim Clark. “He filled our heads with giant numbers of how we were going to make riches and be the most important people on the planet,” Montulli recalled, which conflicted with his own “sort of Marxist” belief that “you couldn’t make more than a million dollars honestly.”

In another Twitter essay, Andreessen argued that technological progress has benefited the poor much more than the rich—an observation he insists “flows from basic economics.” Therefore, he writes, “Opposing tech innovation is punishing the poor by slowing the process by which they get things previously only affordable to the rich.” To recommend patience in implementing technical changes is simply immoral. What’s the difference? Well, one difference is the power relationship. In the case of the disruptive democratic politics that Andreessen appears leery of, members of the public are being given greater control over their lives at the expense of an elite; in the case of disruptive technologies, an elite is driving the change.