A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace

by John Perry Barlow <barlow@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

I have been blogging there and would love you to come visit...
and check out what I have been doing...
paradoxpollack.com

it may concern,
the world answers only to itself and any
and all haunts
becoming and losing themselves in the school and class that occurs from refinement,
all that to say, yes
to the hope of all the evolutions, and how in the dissappearence of one thing always arises a new
and in the world where most of us grew up ,
the evolution of the desruction generation,

so much died along with john lennon, and with JFK and with MLKjr,
and all those who took the bait into the future
the messiah is here already in the shape of all those that i love.

I have a love which is as ancient as the forest
who speaks with the silence that the trees dream,

learning how to own it.

to whom it may concern ,which
is all whom know how to live,

and who live with me here on this planet
in =this plane
transcending all
living in and through
emptyness

I haven't visited here in a while. I felt like every time I came to the site that it was down ,
so I walked away.
I realized that I have spent many hours here, preachin from my vitural soapbox.
I am not going to Burning man to spend my days at the desk and in my corpus design...
I will need any and all support I can get.
I feel like a bridge being built over great expanse, needing both sides to reach to me...
Blessings on your every breath and your work on the bridge we build between the worlds,
the one we are in and through the process we commit to daily to bring forth the world we wish to live in...
-Paradox

So as the possessd we conceive the 4th person plural.
The e-nfectios, in factious, infectious
smoking from the rays of th sun, not hated, but inherited,
the vampires are the future us,
just as we realize the zombies are our future
and the grey aliens us in the future of our techno-fetishism,
blade runners and the saints who welcome the victory of God or Satan.
Lucifer or Yaweh, YHVH, this and that
batman anad joker, truth and fiction, right and wrong,
saturation of the principles, to become scorschd to phoenix ash
and drown’d to mermaids breathing water. The goals,
the every goal,
the fragment.
All of this a flower, a stumbling block upon the gift of nature,
Do you really still blame eve for her works,
do you still blame Adam for his arrogance to be god, but he was god first,
so behind the curtain, there behind god
there behind the laws of science,
there glaring
is the far off truth
which is ever near
where we know the other,
we mark the truth and practical articulation of the up turned eye, the horizon watcher,
the punctual creation, the armature, the irony, the single pod of presentation and into the design,
So the vampires whom are we will inherit the earth,

This is the thinking and functioning prayer mind of a living God. The gods used to think so big that the nature of the world’s spin spun around the single rule of power, Darwinian all seeing greed for the center of the densest matter, to raise it to the sun
so many functions of the sun, one for
each ray on an infinite radii,
it all finds peace in it’s celebrity
being the natural home for it’s heart…

called to speak here.
my story.
so I was born Andrew Pollack and in the beginning it was sweet in that semi suburban way, and it went through alot of small rebelions and then the there as a moment, i was playing with superhero dolls, and we had all the dc universe and i was feeling the world falling apart around me and i called out to green arrow to fight the giant one mind robot and it was just one perfectly placed arrow.
My hole life has been that arrow. Through my barmitzvah humiliation and the whole nine yars to finally leave all of those lies to follow what was offered as truth at th time. A crossbone style, a picture of the heaven that could be brought to earth by beleiving in miracles and I followed that story.
Askd myself how i could step outside of the game. Brought up on pROUDHON AND gOLDMAN, AND THE STREET CULTURE OF nORTH AND wEST pHILADeLPHIA.
Punk rock and hardcore andthen in san francisco after a lifein the theart of theatre as community spectacle stepped into the circus, into ritual, into immesive technologies of conscioussnss expansion.
I beleive in Art as the medicine of the world. I beleive we have a chance to flip the script entirely and it will take the best of every sales pitch and every damn invention to make it real and I am ready to speak for it and stay up nights for it and assume power for it and be as kind and true to my nature as possible and heal the wounds of the human animal with all of my friends. I know it is poassible. I need your help. All of you and you all need my hlp and I am telling my story this way because i am living in th fountain of culture and purifying my soul so thaT I may love my way nd doggedly pursue the solving of our history to make of this old world, a new world…
Script, Own It.