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A one hundred thousand watt FM radio tower in the Ohio Valley was cut down in broad daylight this week, severing a major regional signal without warning. The incident has raised serious questions about infrastructure vulnerability and who, exactly, has both the access and the motive to take down a transmitter of that scale in plain sight.
That story connects in an odd way to something older resurfacing online — John Perry Barlow's nineteen ninety six Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace is making the rounds again on Hacker News. Written at a moment of genuine idealism about what the internet could become, it reads today as both visionary and naive, a reminder of how far the open web has drifted from the dream its early architects imagined.
And that drift is precisely what a recent open letter to Substack tried to address — until the platform's CEO publicly dismissed it as, quote, AI slop. The response landed badly with many writers who see it as a telling sign of how platform leaders now handle dissent: not with argument, but with a label designed to end the conversation before it starts.
Keep surfing. Tech Beat out.
