Date: Fri, 9 Feb 1996 17:16:35 +0100
To: barlow@eff.org
From: John Perry Barlow <barlow@eff.org>
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 ourworld, 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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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
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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
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It is error alone which needs the support of government. Truth can
stand by itself.
--Thomas Jefferson, Notes on Virginia