1996-02-10
Craig A. Johnson
I am somewhat surprised at the apparent paucity of discussion on this
list at this crucial juncture for cyber-democracy.
Perhaps this essay by John Perry Barlow will stir things up a bit.
--caj
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Date: Fri, 09 Feb 1996 21:35:20 -0500
From: Dave Farber <•••@••.•••>
Subject: IP: *** A MUST READ *** A Cyberspace Independence Declaration
-- from John Barlow
Posted-Date: Fri, 9 Feb 1996 15:26:35 -0500
Date: Fri, 9 Feb 1996 17:16:35 +0100
To: •••@••.•••
From: John Perry Barlow <•••@••.•••>
Subject: A Cyberspace Independence Declaration
Yesterday, that great invertebrate in the White House signed into the
law the Telecom "Reform" Act of 1996, while Tipper Gore took digital
photographs of the proceedings to be included in a book called "24
Hours in Cyberspace."
I had also been asked to participate in the creation of this book by
writing something appropriate to the moment. Given the atrocity that
this legislation would seek to inflict on the Net, I decided it was as
good a time as any to dump some tea in the virtual harbor.
After all, the Telecom "Reform" Act, passed in the Senate with only 5
dissenting votes, makes it unlawful, and punishable by a $250,000 to
say "shit" online. Or, for that matter, to say any of the other 7
dirty words prohibited in broadcast media. Or to discuss abortion
openly. Or to talk about any bodily function in any but the most
clinical terms.
It attempts to place more restrictive constraints on the conversation
in Cyberspace than presently exist in the Senate cafeteria, where I
have dined and heard colorful indecencies spoken by United States
senators on every occasion I did.
This bill was enacted upon us by people who haven't the slightest idea
who we are or where our conversation is being conducted. It is, as my
good friend and Wired Editor Louis Rossetto put it, as though "the
illiterate could tell you what to read."
Well, fuck them.
Or, more to the point, let us now take our leave of them. They have
declared war on Cyberspace. Let us show them how cunning, baffling,
and powerful we can be in our own defense.
I have written something (with characteristic grandiosity) that I hope
will become one of many means to this end. If you find it useful, I
hope you will pass it on as widely as possible. You can leave my name
off it if you like, because I don't care about the credit. I really
don't.
But I do hope this cry will echo across Cyberspace, changing and
growing and self-replicating, until it becomes a great shout equal to
the idiocy they have just inflicted upon us.
I give you...
A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace
Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and
steel, 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.
We have no elected government, nor are we likely to have one, so I
address you with no greater authority than that with which liberty
itself always speaks. I declare the global social space we are
building to be naturally independent of the tyrannies you seek to
impose on us. You have no moral right to rule us nor do you possess
any methods of enforcement we have true reason to fear.
Governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed.
You have neither solicited nor received ours. We did not invite you.
You do not know us, nor do you know our world. Cyberspace does not
lie within your borders. Do not think that you can build it, as though
it were a public construction project. You cannot. It is an act of
nature and it grows itself through our collective actions.
You have not engaged in our great and gathering conversation, nor did
you create the wealth of our marketplaces. You do not know our
culture, our ethics, or the unwritten codes that already provide our
society more order than could be obtained by any of your impositions.
You claim there are problems among us that you need to solve. You use
this claim as an excuse to invade our precincts. Many of these
problems don't exist. Where there are real conflicts, where there are
wrongs, we will identify them and address them by our means. We are
forming our own Social Contract . This governance will arise according
to the conditions of our world, not yours. Our world is different.
Cyberspace consists of transactions, relationships, and thought
itself, arrayed like a standing wave in the web of our communications.
Ours is a world that is both everywhere and nowhere, but it is not
where bodies live.
We are creating a world that all may enter without privilege or
prejudice accorded by race, economic power, military force, or station
of birth.
We are creating a world where anyone, anywhere may express his or her
beliefs, no matter how singular, without fear of being coerced into
silence or conformity.
Your legal concepts of property, expression, identity, movement, and
context do not apply to us. They are based on matter, There is no
matter here.
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 . Our
identities may be distributed across many of your jurisdictions. The
only law that all our constituent cultures would generally recognize
is the Golden Rule. We hope we will be able to build our particular
solutions on that basis. But we cannot accept the solutions you are
attempting to impose.
In the United States, you have today created a law, the
Telecommunications Reform Act, which repudiates your own Constitution
and insults the dreams of Jefferson, Washington, Mill, Madison,
DeToqueville, and Brandeis. These dreams must now be born anew in us.
You are terrified of your own children, since they are natives in a
world where you will always be immigrants. Because you fear them, you
entrust your bureaucracies with the parental responsibilities you are
too cowardly to confront yourselves. In our world, all the sentiments
and expressions of humanity, from the debasing to the angelic, are
parts of a seamless whole, the global conversation of bits. We cannot
separate the air that chokes from the air upon which wings beat.
In China, Germany, France, Russia, Singapore, Italy and the United
States, you are trying to ward off the virus of liberty by erecting
guard posts at the frontiers of Cyberspace. These may keep out the
contagion for a small time, but they will not work in a world that
will soon be blanketed in bit-bearing media.
Your increasingly obsolete information industries would perpetuate
themselves by proposing laws, in America and elsewhere, that claim to
own speech itself throughout the world. These laws would declare ideas
to be another industrial product, no more noble than pig iron. In our
world, whatever the human mind may create can be reproduced and
distributed infinitely at no cost. The global conveyance of thought no
longer requires your factories to accomplish.
These increasingly hostile and colonial measures place us in the same
position as those previous lovers of freedom and self-determination
who had to reject the authorities of distant, uninformed powers. We
must declare our virtual selves immune to your sovereignty, even as we
continue to consent to your rule over our bodies. We will spread
ourselves across the Planet so that no one can arrest our thoughts.
We will create a civilization of the Mind in Cyberspace. May it be
more humane and fair than the world your governments have made before.
Davos, Switzerland
February 8, 1996
****************************************************************
John Perry Barlow, Cognitive Dissident
Co-Founder, Electronic Frontier Foundation
Home(stead) Page: http://www.eff.org/~barlow
Message Service: 800/634-3542
Barlow in Meatspace Today (until Feb 12): Cannes, France
Hotel Martinez: (33) 92 98 73 00, Fax: (33) 93 39 67 82
Coming soon to: Amsterdam 2/13-14, Winston-Salem 2/15, San Francisco
2/16-20, San Jose 2/21, San Francisco 2/21-23, Pinedale, Wyoming
In Memoriam, Dr. Cynthia Horner and Jerry Garcia
*****************************************************************
It is error alone which needs the support of government. Truth can
stand by itself.
--Thomas Jefferson, Notes on Virginia
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