[tor-talk] A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace

[z9wahqvh]

interesting reflection by JPB in his own words
<http://archive.is/ut0al#selection-413.2-415.425>, circa 2007:

I suppose I should come up with [a] revised edition. I want to make it more
> obvious that I didn't think that cyberspace was sublimely detached from the
> real world. It isn't... it's not like never never land. It bears the same
> relationship to the physical world that the mind does to the body. They are
> intimately connected, but are quite different. I'd also probably make it
> slightly less strident... I was angry when I wrote it.
>


On Sat, Mar 7, 2015 at 11:14 AM, Kevin <kevinsisco61784 at gmail.com> wrote:

> On 3/7/2015 4:50 AM, Александр wrote:
>
>> ​​
>> by John Perry Barlow
>>
>> 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
>>
> This is harsh and creates an us VS. them mentality.
>
>
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