In 1996 I rode in a minicab up the M40 to Oxford to take part in one of the Oxford Union's famous debates. My debating partner was Jerry Yang, founder of Yahoo!
I'd like to tell you that we've been firm friends ever since and that I regularly visit Jerry and his lovely family at his beach house in Santa Monica. Sadly, that was our one and only meeting. Still, we won the debate hands down - by a margin of nearly two to one, if I remember correctly.
The proposition we were defending - "the internet represents the end of the nation state" - obviously caught the imagination of the students and press in the debating hall. There were audible woops of approval as the result was announced. People really seemed to take pleasure in the imminent collapse of something as big and ugly as the nation state.
From the beginning, geeks liked to think about the net in spatial terms. While the pop media picked up the disappointingly linear idea of an "information superhighway" (something to do with Al Gore's dad), the early settlers fell in love with a much more potent image from a 1986 William Gibson book Neuromancer: cyberspace.
Gibson called cyberspace a "consensual hallucination" - an impossibly vivid 3D visualisation of the networked world. One that many longed to inhabit.
Millions moved in. While the geeks were building their castles in the air and pulling up the drawbridge behind them, governments and institutions drank the Kool-Aid too. The US government under Bill Clinton, for instance, foreswore sales taxes from ecommerce businesses, granting the net a kind of offshore status that still stands and irks real world merchants more than a little.
It was Clinton too who set up ICANN (the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers), a private corporation charged with administering a vital global resource - the international system of domain names - for the first time ever and with barely a whimper from any government anywhere.
Nearly seven years later I visited the Oxford Union again last week for a conference called The Politics of Code. Dozens of speakers confirmed our worst fear. Not only is the old-fashioned nation state alive and well but the virtual nation we call the net is increasingly under attack from the real world.
If the Internet was ever a nation unto itself, then the borders are being torn down now. The message from the conference was that, far from being an offshore utopia, floating off from the real world and not subject to its laws, the net is going to be subject to greater control and more stringent regulation than we ever imagined.
The culprit is "code", the zeros and ones from which everything in the networked world is necessarily made. Code - the rules embodied in software - will provide governments and corporations with the tools they need to lock down the net, eliminating important real world concepts such as "fair use" of copyright material and imperilling the fragile public domain itself.
The copyright wars between the media owners and the net will be the first skirmish in the ultimate reining in of the net's cherished freedoms. It turns out that the institutions of the old-fashioned nation state are more enduring than the internet pioneers hoped.
The independent, self-governing republic of cyberspace never arrived. Its border posts were never built and its administration never sworn in. That we ever imagined that it could be now seems like a cruel delusion.
The fantasy cyberspace - a state unto itself divorced from real world inconveniences like laws and taxes - may be dissolving into the air, but will anything distinctive survive?
The answer, of course, is yes. The net has evolved, and will continue evolving, into a rich and complex social place: hundreds of millions of networked citizens (mostly firmly rooted to their chairs in various real nations) creating and communicating, building the next society, a "society of mind" (to borrow Marvin Minsky's phrase) composed entirely of their interactions.
It's not a fantasy to imagine that as the uncompromised freedom of the first internet decade is eroded it might be replaced by a new freedom to build and augment communities, to produce new social forms and to enrich our lives in the real world as we do so.
