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

Kevin kevinsisco61784 at gmail.com
Sat Mar 7 16:14:57 UTC 2015


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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