NetNews Offline 2/NetNews Offline Volume 2.iso/news/comp/sys/amiga/misc-part1/6160

Internet Message Format | 1996-08-05 | 5.8 KB

Path: news.kcsys.com!usenet
From: [e-mail] (Jason Meudt)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.introduction,comp.sys.amiga.misc,comp.sys.amiga.networking,comp.sys.amiga.datacomm,comp.sys.amiga.advocacy,alt.bbs.internet
Subject: Cyberspace Declaration of Independence
Date: 14 Feb 96 15:08:54 -800
Organization: Inland Internet Services
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On 12-Feb-96 19:07:55, Dani_K said to All something about Cyberspace Declaration
of Independence

I found this and thought that it might be of interest...

-Jason


>Hi Guys,

>I did not write the following.  I cannot take credit for it.
>I am not crediting the original author, not because he doesn't
>deserve the credit, but because this declaration belongs to
>all of us and should be read as such.  And I'll damn well
>sign it.  Send it to the president, post it where you see fit.

>------------------------------------------------------------------

>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 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.
>
>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.
>------------------------------------------------------------------



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