Chaos Computer Club 1997 February/cccd_beta_feb_97.iso/chaos/ds54/ds54_19.txt

Text File | 1997-02-28 | 8KB | 222 lines

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Ausgabe 54

A Cy'berspace Independence Decl~ration

    Yesterday, that great invertebrate in the White
House signed into the lsw the Telecom
"Reform" Act of 1996, while Tipper Gore took
digital photogMphs of the proceedings to be
included in a book called "24 Hours in Cyber-
space."

    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 mat-
ter, to say any of the other 7 dirty words prohi-
bited 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 indecen-
cies 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 l~ouis Rosset-
to put it, as though "the illiterate could tell you
what to read."

Well, fack 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
fense.

    I have written something (with characteristic
grandiosity) tnat I hope will'oecome one of

many means to tnis 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 Cyber-
space, 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

    Goveruments 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 wit'n no
greater authority tban that with which liberty
itself always speaks. I declare the global social
space we are building to be naturally
independent of tne 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 tne 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 dees not lie witnin your bor-
ders. 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 gathe-
ring conversation, nor did you create t'ne wealth
of our marketplaces. You do not know our cul-
ture, our ethics, or the unwritten codes that
already provide our society more order than
could be obtained by any of your impositions.

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Ausgabe 54

Seite 19

    You claim there are problems among us tbat
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 con-
flicts, where there are wrongs, we will identify
them and address them by our means. We are
forrning our own Social Contract . This gover-
nance will arise according to the conditions of
our world, not yours. Our world is different.

    Cyberspace consists of transactions, relations-
hips, 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
bir~.

    We are creating a world where anyone,
anywhere may express his or her beliefs, no
matter how singular, wiEhout fear of being coer-
ced 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 ouly 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 bom 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 senti-
ments and expressions of humanity, from the
debasing to the angelic, are parts of a scamless
whole, the global conversation of bits. We can-
not separate the air that chokes from the air
upon which wings beat.

    In China, Germany, France, Russia, Singepo-
re, 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 indu-
stries would perpetuate themselves by
proposing laws, in America and elsewLere, tbat
claim to own speech itself thronghout 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 b~e reproduced and distri-
buted inEinitely at no cost. The global
conveyance of thought no longer requires your
faciories to accomplish.

    These increasingly hostile and colonial mea-
sures place us in the same position as those pre-
vious 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 contiaue to consent to your rule over our
bodies. We will spread ourselves across the Pla-
net 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 goveruments have made
before. Davos, Switzerland February ~,1996

John Perry Barlow, barlow0eff.org
Cognitive Dissident Co-Founder, Electronk

Frontier Foundation Home(stead) Page:

http:J/www. eff. org/~barlow

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