64 lines
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Plaintext
64 lines
5.0 KiB
Plaintext
# A Declaration of the Independence of
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Cyberspace
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by John Perry Barlow <barlow@eff.org>
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Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the
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new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not
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welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.
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We have no elected government, nor are we likely to have one, so I address you with no greater
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authority than that with which liberty itself always speaks. I declare the global social space we are
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building to be naturally independent of the tyrannies you seek to impose on us. You have no moral
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right to rule us nor do you possess any methods of enforcement we have true reason to fear.
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Governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. You have neither solicited nor
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received ours. We did not invite you. You do not know us, nor do you know our world. Cyberspace
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does not lie within your borders. Do not think that you can build it, as though it were a public
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construction project. You cannot. It is an act of nature and it grows itself through our collective
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actions.
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You have not engaged in our great and gathering conversation, nor did you create the wealth of our
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marketplaces. You do not know our culture, our ethics, or the unwritten codes that already provide
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our society more order than could be obtained by any of your impositions.
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You claim there are problems among us that you need to solve. You use this claim as an excuse to
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invade our precincts. Many of these problems don't exist. Where there are real conflicts, where there
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are wrongs, we will identify them and address them by our means. We are forming our own Social
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Contract . This governance will arise according to the conditions of our world, not yours. Our world is
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different.
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Cyberspace consists of transactions, relationships, and thought itself, arrayed like a standing wave in
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the web of our communications. Ours is a world that is both everywhere and nowhere, but it is not
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where bodies live.
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We are creating a world that all may enter without privilege or prejudice accorded by race, economic
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power, military force, or station of birth.
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We are creating a world where anyone, anywhere may express his or her beliefs, no matter how
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singular, without fear of being coerced into silence or conformity.
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Your legal concepts of property, expression, identity, movement, and context do not apply to us. They
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are all based on matter, and there is no matter here.
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Our identities have no bodies, so, unlike you, we cannot obtain order by physical coercion. We believe
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that from ethics, enlightened self-interest, and the commonweal, our governance will emerge . Our
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identities may be distributed across many of your jurisdictions. The only law that all our constituent
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cultures would generally recognize is the Golden Rule. We hope we will be able to build our particular
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solutions on that basis. But we cannot accept the solutions you are attempting to impose.
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In the United States, you have today created a law, the Telecommunications Reform Act, which
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repudiates your own Constitution and insults the dreams of Jefferson, Washington, Mill, Madison,
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DeToqueville, and Brandeis. These dreams must now be born anew in us.
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You are terrified of your own children, since they are natives in a world where you will always be
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immigrants. Because you fear them, you entrust your bureaucracies with the parental responsibilities
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you are too cowardly to confront yourselves. In our world, all the sentiments and expressions of
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humanity, from the debasing to the angelic, are parts of a seamless whole, the global conversation of
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bits. We cannot separate the air that chokes from the air upon which wings beat.
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In China, Germany, France, Russia, Singapore, Italy and the United States, you are trying to ward off
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the virus of liberty by erecting guard posts at the frontiers of Cyberspace. These may keep out the
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contagion for a small time, but they will not work in a world that will soon be blanketed in
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bit-bearing media.
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Your increasingly obsolete information industries would perpetuate themselves by proposing laws, in
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America and elsewhere, that claim to own speech itself throughout the world. These laws would
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declare ideas to be another industrial product, no more noble than pig iron. In our world, whatever
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the human mind may create can be reproduced and distributed infinitely at no cost. The global
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conveyance of thought no longer requires your factories to accomplish.
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These increasingly hostile and colonial measures place us in the same position as those previous
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lovers of freedom and self-determination who had to reject the authorities of distant, uninformed
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powers. We must declare our virtual selves immune to your sovereignty, even as we continue to
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consent to your rule over our bodies. We will spread ourselves across the Planet so that no one can
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arrest our thoughts.
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We will create a civilization of the Mind in Cyberspace. May it be more humane and fair than the
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world your governments have made before.
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Davos, Switzerland
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February 8, 1996
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