A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace
( by John
Perry Barlow <barlow(at)eff.org> )
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