A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace
John Perry Barlow
Source: https://www.eff.org/cyberspace-independence
License: CC BY, as marked by the Electronic Frontier Foundation page footer.
Bundled by DCENT_Toolbox for local offline reading in the TUI.

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
