
A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace - jeremynixon
https://projects.eff.org/~barlow/Declaration-Final.html
======
rayiner
What blather. Cyberspace is just a way for people to communicate--flesh and
bone people who live and work in cities of concrete and steel, and are bound
to each other by social compacts that encompass both the tangible and
intangible. The subjects of cyberspace are "transactions" and "relationships"
and "thoughts"\--but those transactions overwhelmingly pertain to tangible
things, those relationships are between physical people, and those thoughts
are overwhelmingly about things that exist in the real world.

To the extent that the institutions of the corporeal world regulate
cyberspace, they do so to protect real-world people. The abused child depicted
in pornography, the artist who converted chemical fuel into a creative work,
the consumer that purchased a physical product. Real-world harms don't become
not-real simply because they are transacted through a digital medium.

Of course, to the extent that activities in Cyberspace cannot impinge on the
real world, then institutions should not regulate, but that reduces simply to
an argument for free speech.

~~~
trhway
>What blather. Cyberspace is just a way for people to communicate--flesh and
bone people who live and work in cities of concrete and steel, and are bound
to each other by social compacts that encompass both the tangible and
intangible. The subjects of cyberspace are "transactions" and "relationships"
and "thoughts"\--but those transactions overwhelmingly pertain to tangible
things, those relationships are between physical people, and those thoughts
are overwhelmingly about things that exist in the real world.

man, you're right as long as tangible world is more "important" than
intangible. But one can imagine the moment when tangible world will become a
sub-servient to intangible, when the "transactions" and "relationships" and
"thoughts" will be mostly with /about intangible things(and persons like AI or
uploaded ones) existing only in cyberspace.

------
tedunangst
> 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.

You can, however, regulate it as a Title II utility. That's ok.

------
smacktoward
Hard to believe this is nearly 20 years old. I remember reading about it in
_Wired_ magazine when it first came out. (This is when _Wired_ was worth
reading, which was also a long time ago.)

Unfortunately it hasn't aged well, not least in that seeing that a manifesto
was issued from Davos puts a very different spin on it today than it did back
then.

------
snikeris
Random trivia of the day...this guy (John Perry Barlow) also wrote Grateful
Dead lyrics. He primarily collaborated w/ Bob Weir.

~~~
reminiscentplay
And helped out with Dick Cheney's campaigns.

------
systemtheory
soooooo, the way i see it, imho, is that any government which derives its
authority from the governed is inseparable from the governed. i.e. government
= proper subset of governed. either cyberspace is lawless (and might makes
right) or there is some form of law, thus some form of governance, and thus a
government. again inmho, a government of and by the people is better than,
say, fascism. until we've evolved to the state of Zee Prime, cyberspace will
continue to exist in that most primitive of mediums, atomic matter, and so
must share the domain of nation states and such. look at me now, blathering on
as much as this article. all i was trying to say is, given that cyberspace is
pervasive throughout the political structures of our earth, maybe we should
productively engage rather than hostilely withdrawal. that, and Jefferson was
able to eloquently express his deep understanding of governance through his
pen while still clearly shouting, "leave us the f-ck alone or expect a fight
you english b-stards." you just new he meant it.

------
pnathan
Another artifact of this time is Rushkoff's book Cyberia. It didn't age well
either, but it informs an understanding of the time.

------
trhway
Unfortunately, if history of human species is any indication, only War makes
Declaration matter.

~~~
bcg1
Indeed, and the storm clouds are gathering.

~~~
nosuchthing
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mHfVd42lIBA&feature=youtu.be...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mHfVd42lIBA&feature=youtu.be&t=57m25s)

------
ChuckMcM
For context this was written during the height of the first war on encryption.

~~~
systemtheory
ah, that clears it up.

------
aaronem
"How many divisions has [cyberspace]?"

~~~
tomjen3
Substantially all of them.

NK is about the only country that doesn't have internet and while their army
is numerically large it is a paper tiger - all the rest of the countries in
the world could not live separate from the internet, even if their governments
demanded it.

------
holychiz
lofty thoughts but really impractical. Look, gov'ts will always need to be
part of the conversation.

------
sbr2015
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...

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](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

------
driverdan
(1996)

