From b2a29e06d9785fbddb3b9f239bd76e6a47d72eb4 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: glenda Date: Tue, 19 Jan 2021 21:56:13 +0000 Subject: blog init --- webdecind.gmi | 63 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ 1 file changed, 63 insertions(+) create mode 100644 webdecind.gmi (limited to 'webdecind.gmi') diff --git a/webdecind.gmi b/webdecind.gmi new file mode 100644 index 0000000..2936f23 --- /dev/null +++ b/webdecind.gmi @@ -0,0 +1,63 @@ +# A Declaration of the Independence of + Cyberspace + 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 -- cgit 1.4.1-2-gfad0