The Internet may well disempower the nation state, but at the same time, it also strengthens certain specific state functions - like surveillance. As a political entity, it doesn't empower the nation sate. It creates the availability of much more data than the digestive system of the nation state could possibly assimilate.
Interpretation
The Internet challenges nation-states by making them less powerful, yet it enhances their ability to monitor citizens.
John Perry Barlow's quote reflects the dual nature of the Internet in relation to nation-states. While it appears to undermine the traditional powers of states by facilitating the free flow of information and reducing their control, it simultaneously provides these states with advanced tools for surveillance and data collection. The overwhelming volume of data available can surpass what a state can effectively manage, leading to a paradox where states may feel both empowered and disempowered by this technology.
In practice
Discussing the effects of technology on governance at a political conference.
With the development of the Internet...we are in the middle of the most transforming technological event since the capture of fire. I used to think that it was just the biggest thing since Gutenberg, but now I think you have to go back farther.
The Internet treats censorship as a malfunction and routes around it.
If all ideas have to be bought, then you have an intellectually regressive system that will assure you have a highly knowledgeable elite and an ignorant mass.
Our identities have no bodies, so, unlike you, we cannot obtain order by physical coercion. We believe that from ethics, enlightened self-interest, and the commonweal, our governance will emerge.
The Internet amplifies power in all respects. It can grossly exaggerate the power of the individual.
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.
I find that creative streak I think often leads in programmers to be good predictors of where culture as a whole is going to go. And that is where I think I've tried over the years to in some ways use my customers as a filter or a predictor of where technology as a whole is going to go. Or where the world as a whole is going to go.
Here I am, ninety years old and ready for the cooling board, using a brand new Macintosh computer, and there you sit, twenty-two and gorgeous, fresh as a new peach, yet scrawling on a yellow legal pad like an old maid in a Victorian romance.
Some jerk infected the Internet with an outright lie. It shows how easy it is to do and how credulous people are.
I believe that at the end of the century the use of words and general educated opinion will have altered so much that one will be able to speak of machines thinking without expecting to be contradicted.
The science of today is the technology of tomorrow.
What the computer in virtual reality enables us to do is to recalibrate ourselves so that we can start seeing those pieces of information that are invisible to us but have become important for us to understand.
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