Twenty years ago, the conditions facing the technology industry were not unlike those today. A burgeoning consumer market, declining manufacturing costs and easy access to venture capital had begun to inflate the dot-com bubble. Cryptographers were at war with the government over whether encryption tools should have back doors for law enforcement. And a new generation of Internet activists both feared and welcomed the impact of pending government regulation; in this case, the period equivalent of net neutrality was the Telecommunications Act of 1996.

Even as Silicon Valley began to capture the countrys imagination, the tech elite were souring on their government. They accommodated it where they thought they needed to telecom firms, for instance, enabled surveillance by acquiescing to records requests from the intelligence agencies and they received tokens such as start-up tax breaks and STEM investments in return. But eventually the predominant attitude was alienation: The Internet was theirs, not Big Brothers. That feeling only deepened over the past two decades and, thanks to the revelations of Edward Snowden, tech executives now feel emboldened to challenge government surveillance with lawyers and encryption. Meanwhile, they routinely compare their corporations to city-states or call for the secession of the San Francisco Bay Area.

To understand where this cyber-libertarian ideology came from, you have to understand the influence of A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, one of the strangest artifacts of the 90s, and its singular author, John Perry Barlow. Perhaps more than any other, its his philosophy which melded countercultural utopianism, a ranchers skepticism toward government and a futurists faith in the virtual world that shaped the industry.

The problem is, weve reaped what he sowed.

Generally the province of fascists, artists or fascist artists, manifestos are a dying form. It takes gall to have published one anytime after, say, 1938. But A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace was an utterly serious document for a deliriously optimistic era that Wired, on one of its many valedictory covers, promised was a long boom: 25 years of prosperity, freedom, and a better environment for the whole world. Techno-skeptics need not apply.

Barlows 846-word text, published online in February 1996, begins with a bold rebuke of traditional sovereign powers: Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather. He then explains how cyberspace is a place of ultimate freedom, where conventional laws dont apply. At the end, he exhorts the Internet to be more humane and fair than the world your governments have made before.

The declaration struck a chord. It wasnt the first viral document, but it was one of the periods most pervasive and influential, appearing on thousands of websites within months of its publication. Barlows ideas were invoked, practically as a form of ritual, by many of the industrys influential thinkers Web guru Jeff Jarvis, Wired founder Kevin Kelly, virtual-reality inventor Jaron Lanier. It led to the authors writing (whether journalistic dispatches for Wired or essays outlining his political vision) becoming widely anthologized; The Libertarian Reader, published last month by Simon & Schuster, includes a Barlow thought experiment on the future of government.

More than that, the language and sensibility suffused Silicon Valley thinking. When Eric Schmidt describes the Internet, however misguidedly, as the worlds largest ungoverned space in his book The New Digital Age, he is borrowing Barlows rhetoric. When tech mogul Peter Thiel writes, in The Education of a Libertarian, that he founded PayPal to create a currency free from government control and that by starting a new Internet business, an entrepreneur may create a new world, its impossible not to hear Barlovian echoes.

All this was an unlikely achievement for a man who personified what the British theorists Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron called the Californian Ideology. Barlow wrote songs for the Grateful Dead, tended to his parents Wyoming ranch in the waning days of family farms and eventually helped co-found the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights advocacy organization.

To Barbrook and Cameron, the Californian Ideology reflected a new faith emerging from a bizarre fusion of the cultural bohemianism of San Francisco with the hi-tech industries of Silicon Valley. It mixed the free-wheeling spirit of the hippies and the entrepreneurial zeal of the yuppies and drew on the states history of countercultural rebellion, its role as a crucible of the New Left, the global-village prophecies of media theorist Marshall McLuhan and a profound faith in the emancipatory potential of the new information technologies. Adherents of the California Ideology many of them survivors of the Me decade, weaned on sci-fi novels, self-help and New Age spiritualism forsook the civil actions of an earlier generation. They thought freedom would be found not in the streets but in an electronic agora, an open digital marketplace where individuality would be allowed its fullest expression, away from the encumbrances of government and even of the physical world.

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Column: Libertarian Roots and Ideals of the Internet Have Come to Naught