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+# A Declaration of the Independence of
+ Cyberspace
+ by John Perry Barlow <barlow@eff.org>
+ 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