CypherCon 2026

Nostalgia is a Sickness. How to Get Well Soon and Recover Internet Optimism

Daly Barnett

Abstract:

The internet used to be fun, freeing, and liberating. For whom? When? If nostalgia is, as Don DeLillo says, a “product of dissatisfaction and rage… a settling of grievances between the present and the past,” how can we be honest about these grievances and fight to redirect the present of technology and surveillance, and maybe, gesture towards a future of recovered optimism? Which principles from the early internet must we hold onto in order to steel a better future? Privacy, free expression, self determination, hackers’ rights, just to name a few.

Daly Barnett

Electronic Frontier Foundation

Daly Barnett is a multidisciplinary technologist whose work focuses on disarming the antisocial impacts of computers. She pursues this by empowering liberation movement workers with the knowledge and capability to resist the annihilating forces of surveillance and hypercapitalist technology overreach. Daly is most attuned to movements for bodily autonomy, with dedicated experience advocating for and working within criminalized issue-spaces such as sex worker rights, transgender liberation, and abortion access. She believes OPSEC for liberation is achieved through community activation (not through application of corporate infosec paradigms) and that bodily autonomy and self-determination are paramount obligations worth fighting for.