A
Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace
by John Perry Barlow <barlow@eff.org>
Berkman Center fellow
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 all based on matter, and 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
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