John Perry Barlow’s intoxicating dream is fading fast and may soon vaporise altogether. In 1996, the American poet stirred the imagination of a generation by proclaiming sovereignty for the nascent internet in his Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace. For the first time in history, this virgin, virtual territory would allow new global communities to form and fresh ideas to flourish, unconstrained by any terrestrial power.

“You have no moral right to rule us nor do you possess any methods of enforcement we have true reason to fear,” he wrote. “We will create a civilisation of the Mind in Cyberspace.”

Barlow’s utopian imaginings of an otherworldly civilisation grew from the compost of the hippie-trippy, flower-power counterculture of San Francisco in the 1960s. This way of thinking seeped into the highly individualistic, anti-establishment entrepreneurial ethos of Silicon Valley, which viewed any incursion by Washington — or its attendant military-industrial complex — with suspicion. It later informed the “Don’t Be Evil” culture of the giant tech companies, such as Google, that came to dominate the internet.