The Internet is the only means of mass communication available to non-wealthy, non-powerful people. It is the only way we have to talk about those few people who exert far more control over our world than all the rest of us combined. The Net is the only means we have by which political, social, and economic democracy can be restored to the U.S. and to the entire world. It is the only path from our present system of one-dollar-one-vote to a system of one-person-one-vote.
The left thinks the mass-media are controlled by big business and government, and the right thinks it's controlled by liberals, but we both agree on one thing: *we* don't control it, and we don't have access to it. The Net is only way our voices can be heard, and it is exactly those people in power who feel threatened by what we have to say, that have forced this censorship upon us.
Seeing pictures of naked people and reading about sexual activity has never harmed children and never will. Cyberporn is not a problem; it's only an excuse to stifle our voices-- we, the people.
This is history in the making, folks, and it is up to all of us to make it. We can't be passive bystanders, or the censors will roll right over us--permanently. We have to fight for our freedom, by violating the censorship at every opportunity, and now is the time. What we do in the next few weeks and months will have major effects on the future of our species and our world. They can't arrest all of us, and those who remain free must fully support those whom the fascists, fundamentalists, and corporatists select as examples to persecute.
We must support those of us whom they attack, support them with political pressure, and especially with legal defense funds. There are well over 20 million people on line today, and if each contributes a mere $50, the cost of two months of fees for Net access, it adds up to a *billion* dollars to pay for the best defense possible.
"When you can't say 'fuck,' you can't say
'Fuck the government.'" -- Lenny Bruce
For additional information:
(end of introduction)
Subject: J.P. Barlow: A Cyberspace Independence Declaration
This is as good a call to arms as we're liable to get. Pass it on. Once more into the breech!
John
Yesterday, that great invertebrate in the White House signed into the law the Telecom "Reform" Act of 1996, while Tipper Gore took digital photographs of the proceedings to be included in a book called "24 Hours in Cyberspace."
I had also been asked to participate in the creation of this book by writing something appropriate to the moment. Given the atrocity that this legislation would seek to inflict on the Net, I decided it was as good a time as any to dump some tea in the virtual harbor.
After all, the Telecom "Reform" Act, passed in the Senate with only 5 dissenting votes, makes it unlawful, and punishable by a $250,000 to say "shit" online. Or, for that matter, to say any of the other 7 dirty words prohibited in broadcast media. Or to discuss abortion openly. Or to talk about any bodily function in any but the most clinical terms.
It attempts to place more restrictive constraints on the conversation in Cyberspace than presently exist in the Senate cafeteria, where I have dined and heard colorful indecencies spoken by United States senators on every occasion I did.
This bill was enacted upon us by people who haven't the slightest idea who we are or where our conversation is being conducted. It is, as my good friend and Wired Editor Louis Rossetto put it, as though "the illiterate could tell you what to read."
Well, fuck them.
Or, more to the point, let us now take our leave of them. They have declared war on Cyberspace. Let us show them how cunning, baffling, and powerful we can be in our own defense.
I have written something (with characteristic grandiosity) that I hope will become one of many means to this end. If you find it useful, I hope you will pass it on as widely as possible. You can leave my name off it if you like, because I don't care about the credit. I really don't.
But I do hope this cry will echo across Cyberspace, changing and growing and self-replicating, until it becomes a great shout equal to the idiocy they have just inflicted upon us.
I give you...
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 based on matter, 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
Quelle: http://www.uni-tuebingen.de/uni/sii/sm/indep.htm
February 8, 1996
John Perry Barlow, Cognitive Dissident
Co-Founder, Electronic Frontier Foundation
Home(stead) Page: http://www.eff.org/~barlow
Message Service: 800/634-3542
Barlow in Meatspace Today (until Feb 12): Cannes, France
Hotel Martinez: (33) 92 98 73 00, Fax: (33) 93 39 67 82
Coming soon to: Amsterdam 2/13-14, Winston-Salem 2/15, San Francisco
2/16-20, San Jose 2/21, San Francisco 2/21-23, Pinedale, Wyoming
In Memoriam, Dr. Cynthia Horner and Jerry Garcia
Link: http://www.eff.org/~barlow
Link: http://www.uni-tuebingen.de/uni/sii/sm/indep.htm
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