Reposted from John Perry Barlow's site ...
Date: Fri, 9 Feb 1996 17:16:35 +0100
To: barlow@eff.org
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
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