The Net is rendered "regulable" or "unregulable" by commercial software and hardware designers, not politicians, he says. He who owns the code, controls cyberspace. If the government fails to set up at least modest speed limits on the information superhighway, Lessig argues, then predatory or just plain ill-considered practices by various agents on the Web will destroy its original core values of innovative thought, free speech and the open exchange of ideas.

"This code presents the greatest threat to liberal or libertarian ideals, as well as their greatest promise," he states in his book, Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace (New York: Basic Books, 1999). "We can build, or architect, or code cyberspace to protect values that we believe are fundamental, or we can build, or architect, or code cyberspace to allow those values to disappear."

A different kind of think tank based in Cambridge, Mass., Forrester Research, agrees that it would be wrong for the Web to live by self-regulation alone. According to an announcement (February, 2000) from the usually go-go Internet bunch: "The stakes have become too high to leave Internet decisions outside the democratic political process . . . The Internet's big bang is creating new business models, forms of property, and modes of communication. But those light-speed innovations threaten to end up like Russian capitalism if they outpace the basic legal framework necessary to keep the Net from turning ugly and limiting its own growth."

Despite this apparent call for government action, Barlow prefers anarchy. "The Web will take care of itself," he says. "Although I admire Larry a lot, I find it hard to understand what controls there are that might be proposed."

Yes, he agrees: The basic principles of libertarianism on the Web are in danger. Even if a sense of openness is viewed as a necessity to the human spirit in the new century, the impinging fences crisscrossing the Web seem immune to the passionate and elegant prose that's reminiscent of another revolution in a galaxy far, far away.

Indeed, these are days where the Thomas Paines of cyberspace can make a pretty darn good name for themselves. Since he's connected to using the term in the early years of the Wired magazine community, he's most-often credited with fusing the word "cyberspace" to the Net. He was the first to popularize the term that was taken from William Gibson's prophetic novel, Neuromancer. This is just a footnote in an already rich Barlow file of footnotes to out cultural history, considering he wrote the lyrics to the legendary song "Estimated Prophet." As Gibson introduced the fictional concept in 1984, cyberspace is: "A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts . . . A graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the non-space of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding . . ."

So before we descend any further into this Orwellian nightmare of a future of NSA-trained inquisitors in drab uniforms with Microsoft logos, asking questions about your cookies caches, years 1999 to 2004, please draw freely from a host of other metaphors. They can be drawn from world history, politics and culture, as well as the whole great inter-woven melange of global principles, values and dreams about "openness" currently percolating on the Web.

"It's a social space, an environment that transcends everything we have known before," Barlow says.

If we are still stuck in the old box, drawing allusions to merely American history, what about the advent of innovation that came after the West was won? What about more efficient travel, from the automobile to space flight? Nothing is impossible online, at least technically, in a truly revolutionary society.

As long as we have electricity, the unregulated reality of this technology means that there will always be a way to break through and find a new virtual frontier to roam.

Such openness on the Web is the result of technical choices made when it was designed, and to bend it into a compliant shape is not so easy. Nor do people react the way the controller expects them to. There are many escape routes in this realm. Unlike the finite expanse of the American frontier of the 19th century, cyberspace has no real nature and is, potentially, infinite. Its laws are malleable. It has no unassailable gravity or physics, and where the pioneers of the past explored a horizontal landscape, the navigator of cyberspace can go up, down, sideways, in or out, leaping into any old world whenever they please.

"The further reaches of cyberspace will always be expanding," Barlow says. "Wilderness on the Web will see to taking care of itself."

In the final analysis, the "Wild West myth" should be exposed as a fraud, as an overly simplistic sound bite that's ready and waiting for a demigod's manipulation, and by a potentially dangerous one at that. Especially when myth is used to compel people to move in one direction or another: the demonization of hackers to justify greater powers of electronic surveillance; calls for "settlement" of the frontier that leads to monopolistic control and a "tamed" media; and any advertising for "Manifest Destiny" as determined by AT&T, Time-Warner, Bill Gates, etc.

Each time a Net user connects to the Web they shape this history. As long is it has relatively inexpensive online access and is empowered to make decisions in public life, consumer society will ultimately determine which Net architecture will prevail.