This manifesto is from the summer 2025 issue of VICE magazine: THE REASONS TO BE CHEERFUL ISSUE. To subscribe to four print issues each year, click here—or buy the summer issue on its own.
This manifesto rejects the fashionable retreat from cyberspace.
Cyberspace—still “the home of Mind,” as John Perry Barlow told Davos nearly 30 years ago in his A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace speech—has not collapsed. It has grown crowded. The frontier has become a city: imperfect but vibrant; in need of regulations and better housing, but not beyond repair.
By now, the tech backlash—voiced almost entirely online, to viral applause—has reached a fever pitch. A roster of commentators prescribes disconnection as cure-all, no longer just a rallying cry to get rid of your social media accounts, or to toss your smartphone, but to log off completely. But their counsel to seek more authentic encounters, to touch grass, ignores how thoroughly the digital and the physical have merged.
And most critically, it disregards what cyberspace has given and continues to give us. Our task is neither nostalgic preservation nor retreat, but reclamation. Let us renovate rather than evacuate.
Below are six reasons why the promise of cyberspace still justifies the fight.
We Are Free From Our Bodies
The founding promise of cyberspace was liberation from physical limitations—geography, identity barriers, socioeconomic status. Online, we meet mind-first; the body arrives later, if at all. This doesn’t erase our humanity but highlights a different dimension of it. Yes, ‘For You’ feeds across platforms can resemble highways crowded with influencers—really, now a shorthand for vapidity—but that’s the Internet’s Hollywood: loud, lucrative, largely illusory. Beyond the rhetoric about Instagram thots and TikTok personalities and slop on X, people meet more online now than ever—and crucially, they’re meeting.
We continue to carve out our own nodes of meaning, as we always have.
Chatbots Are Keeping People Company—and It’s Working
Emerging evidence contradicts dismissals of AI companionship as “dystopian.” Research indicates that artificial intimacy, the connection between human and machine, is producing tangible benefits. A 2024 Harvard Business School study by De Freitas and colleagues found that daily conversations with AI companions significantly reduced self-reported loneliness, and that it was more effective in this regard than passive activities like watching videos. People consistently underestimated how much these interactions improved their emotional state.
It’s different. It feels sci-fi. But it’s making us happy.
Fandom—and Memes—Drive Creative Evolution
Cultural critics are always saying that culture is “stuck”—that film, literature, music, and fashion have all flatlined. They insist we inhabit a wasteland: everything’s dead, dead, dead.
But is creativity dead, or transforming? Skibidi Toilet began as a one-off short before expanding into a sprawling, delirious mythos. TikTok’s “Italian brainrot” phenomenon, endlessly remixed and recontextualized, demonstrates how a single joke can become a global cultural marker. Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality—Eliezer Yudkowsky’s fanfiction turned million-word philosophical experiment—catalyzed an entire intellectual movement. This isn’t disposable content. This isn’t “just videos of people twerking.” And this certainly isn’t cultural decline. It’s cultural evolution, shifting from centralized production to distributed co-creation.
Digital Preservation Extends Cultural Memory
Algorithms continually perform impressive acts of resurrection. TikTok revives forgotten songs. Print-on-demand services, not to mention renegade translators, quietly restore out-of-print literature. YouTube and TikTok breathe new life into cult films and obscure television. Social media resurface products from past decades—1990s candy, 1920s cosmetics, 1950s fragrances. Ancient Roman recipes become accessible; turn-of-the-century dolls are restored to their original glory. The network is a perpetual restoration system, allowing each generation to rediscover and reinterpret works, products, scents, and sounds that would have otherwise vanished. What once disappeared into cultural oblivion now persists, awaiting rediscovery.
The Internet Still Mobilizes in Moments of Crisis
In natural disasters, so-called “brainrot” apps come into their own. During the Maui wildfires, social media helped coordinate volunteer efforts and share critical information among affected communities. After the devastating earthquakes in Turkey and Syria, which killed over 50,000 people, volunteers and rescue workers saved lives with their phones. That these climate disasters both happened in 2023 points to a future in which the Internet is evermore important. These use cases, which fueled the original optimism for social media, never went away.
The Internet Is and Always Will Be For the People
Cyberspace still responds to mass movements—it bends when we move together.
The brilliant meme analyst Aidan Walker, in his own exhortation not to log off, highlights compelling examples: the Vexbolts phenomenon demonstrated how digital communities can exercise collective power as over 4 million people coordinated to follow and unfollow a streamer. That same pressure forced Sony’s reversal when Helldivers 2 players review-bombed its forced-login requirement into submission within 48 hours. We witness this leverage in action regularly, sometimes for better (viral fundraising campaigns, whether for refugees or people in need of medical care), sometimes for worse (coordinated harassment). But what it demonstrates is that power remains, even if we still must learn how to harness it effectively.
The problems are real—surveillance capitalism, polarization, algorithmic manipulation—but none are inevitable. The techno-skeptics advocate digital asceticism, as though the physical world offers salvation once we abandon the Internet. That may work for them. I choose the more difficult path: remaining, speaking, and shaping.
The alternative to engagement isn’t utopia but capitulation. By remaining engaged, by building communities of resistance and creation, by claiming our rightful place as netizens—citizens of cyberspace—we insist on a better future. Look around you at how good things already are when people claim they’re at their worst. Now, imagine how much better we can make it.
Cyberspace is ours and it always has been.
Signed this fourteenth day of May 2025 by a netizen who refuses to log off, in memory of John Perry Barlow, who believed in the Internet.
Katherine Dee is the author of default.blog, an emotional scrapbook of the Internet, technology, and the future.
This manifesto is from the summer 2025 issue of VICE magazine: THE REASONS TO BE CHEERFUL ISSUE. To subscribe to four print issues each year, click here—or buy the summer issue on its own.
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