A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace | Electronic Frontier Foundation
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A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace
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John Perry Barlow Library
A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace
Decrypting the Puzzle Palace
A Not Terribly Brief History of the Electronic Frontier Foundation
A Plain Text on Crypto Policy
A Pretty Bad Problem
Across the Electronic Frontier
Barlow in Rockspace
Barlow, Denning on the Clipper Chip scheme
Being in Nothingness
Complete ACM Columns Collection
Crime and Puzzlement
Cynthia Horner's Eulogy
Go Placidly Amidst the Noise and Haste
Is There a There in Cyberspace?
J. Kreilsberg-Barlow interview
Jack In, Young Pioneer!
Jackboots on the Infobahn: Clipping the Wings of Freedom
Just Say Yes
Leaving the Physical World
Mitch Kapor & John Barlow Interview
Passing the Buck on Porn
Selling Wine Without Bottles: The Economy of Mind on the Global Net
Songs for the Dead
Stopping the Information Railroad
TV, LSD, and Life in the Country
The Economy of Ideas (Wired Magazine)
The Pursuit of Emptiness: Why Americans Have Never Been A Happy Bunch
The View from the Brooklyn Bridge
Thinking locally, acting globally
Through Many Panes of Shattered Glass
To Be At Liberty
Verbum Magazine Interview
Who Holds The Keys?
A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace
by John Perry Barlow<br>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.<br>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.<br>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.<br>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.<br>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.<br>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.<br>We are creating a world that all may enter without privilege or prejudice accorded by race, economic power, military force, or station of birth.<br>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.<br>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.<br>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...