Mr. Barlow, you've done many good things for cyberspace and individual rights, and I respect you for that. BUT...I have a major bone to pick with this. I'm not accusing you personally of anything, but I think this document is going to cause more trouble than it's worth, and large chunks of it are patently untrue. Untrue documents that inspire people to correct their mistakes can be uplifting, but this one inspires a level of smug self-righteousness that's not going to make the net a better place. See details below.
To: barlow@eff.org From: John Perry Barlow <barlow@eff.org> Subject: A Cyberspace Independence Declaration
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.
Good call, by the way. I hope the foreword re: hypocrisy also goes into the book.
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.
Let us show them how cunning, baffling, and powerful we can be as armed federal marshals walk into a major ISP and shut down their routers, as replays of Operation Sun Devil occur in people's houses, as major idiocy of the sort that only a scared government in a country which considers itself free can carry out. I don't know which is more disheartening, the actions themselves or the spirit of "we're doing this for your own good" in which they are carried out. But I digress. All the little-boy fantasies of the Powerful Internet don't mean two beans when an officially sanctioned thug turns the switch from 1 to 0 on your POP. It'll happen. Just watch.
I have written something (with characteristic grandiosity) that I hope
Yes.
You can leave my name off it if you like, because I don't care about the credit. I really don't.
I believe you. It's one of the admirable qualities you have.
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.
Yes, that's what I'm afraid of. See my opening remarks.
A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace
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.
Oh, let's start right off pretending that a) the net is an independently funded entity with no government infrastructure and b) independent of (non-electronic) world society and world government While we're at it, let's press a monkey-brain hot button in any person of political power by saying their power does/should not apply here. This will not only make them receptive to the reasoning which we will lay out in the rest of the document, it will impress them with our real-world suavity, tact, and general with-it-ness.
We have no elected government, nor are we likely to have one, so I
Nature abhors a vacuum. I assume it surprises no one that much of the major flack about the net began when it became widely known to government that the net considered itself anarchic.
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 must be talking about IPV6. Sorry, I couldn't resist. But certainly the TRA and various other things will be *much* easier to implement in the IPV6 Internet. Control structures exist to be used, gang.
You have no moral right to rule us
Hello? Are we laboring under the belief that even a scant majority of governments truly believe in the morality of their rule? Or, since a government is a collection of individuals who tend to act with the worst instincts of a mob when only a few are present, that the individuals themselves feel that they are morally entitled to rule?
nor do you possess any methods of enforcement we have true reason to fear.
Like walking into MAE-WEST and powering it down due to court orders. Nope. None at all.
Governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed.
Yes.
You have neither solicited nor received ours. We did not invite you.
We took a defense department network and ran with it, but since we've been playing with it for over a decade, it's ours now. Just like when the neighbor kid loaned us his toy and we fixed it up, painted it, put new wheels on it, and now he wants it back! WAAAAAAHHHH!
You do not know us, nor do you know our world. Cyberspace does not lie within your borders.
Yes, but. Inasmuch as the culture of cyberspace grows from (as you say below) the actions of individuals, it grows from the "real world" (I hate that phrase, but need to use it to be clear). We were all raised in that world, that world provides many (perhaps most) of the denizens of cyberspace with their livelihoods and access, and both encourages and constrains their actions, from the engineer who subscribes to a gay mailing list secretly for fear of losing his job to the public policy advocate who openly posts pro-net/anti-censorship material to com-priv in defiance of her government post.
Do not think that you can build it, as though it were a public construction project. You cannot.
Yes. Though "building" is not quite what I'd call it. More like when they bulldoze a section of neighborhood which is actually a haven for poor families and an extended culture simply because the buildings and the cultural ways are deemed "unsightly"-- large families living in small apartments and hanging out their washing, sitting out on the stoop being neighborly, etc. Townhouses come up and people don't know their neighbors anymore, but it "looks nice" and thus must be progress.
It is an act of nature and it grows itself through our collective actions.
Yes, but see "real world influence" above.
You have not engaged in our great and gathering conversation,
No comment.
nor did you create the wealth of our marketplaces.
You did not pour money down ratholes such as highspeed nets to carry talk.bizarre, sf-lovers, and bandykin because the technical administrators of the existing, government-funded networks knew that cyberspace could emerge if DARPA were tricked into creating it. "Our links are already almost saturated!" You did not provide countless network pioneers a living from government grants nor complain when they spent much of their research time writing network utilities rather than doing AI or compilers or what they were actually being paid to do. You did not pay people to build the network. You did not provide free access and TACACS cards to anyone with the savvy to just ask for them in the late 70's and early 80's, helping grow the core of network culture. You did not again and again provide equipment and resources only to watch them become privatized by the core of sysadmins and techies that you paid over the years, often in outright blackmail ("we'll walk away unless you sell/give us the equipment and facility"). And you certainly didn't do this only to see the same people utterly denigrate the access to those resources and claim that only their time, attention, and effort created the network and cyberspace. Clearly they could have done it without any money, machines, or extant wiring, it was merely more efficient use of their valuable time to do it at your expense.
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.
Yes, like "thou shalt not take home equipment from one's company, university, or govt office without paying for it, even if it is older or unused". Or "thou shalt not steal computer time, long-distance services, etc".
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.
No argument here. Dead on, as far as I'm concerned.
Where there are real conflicts, where there are wrongs, we will identify them and address them by our means.
Like use of copyrighted material, for instance. We who forward things from the "experimental" (but going for years) AP and NYT news wire feeds, the Dave Barry mailing lists, the Calvin and Hobbes cartoon daily web sites, we will identify them and address them by our means if we ever decide there's a problem there that we actually care about. Same with snuff stories about real people, harrassment of women, minorities, or homo/bi/trans-sexuals online, etc. Online advertising actually bothers us, so we completely smite and try to drive out of business people who are clueless enough to try spamming. So what if it's like executing someone for a traffic offense, they should have read the manual before logging in. In the "real world", few of us bother to go to the post office and fill out a card saying "refuse all mail to 'Resident'" because it's too much trouble, thus passively acquiescing to the torrents of junkmail and flyers we get from our neighborhood stores. I wonder why they get the idea that direct mail works?
We are forming our own Social Contract . This governance will arise according to the conditions of our world, not yours. Our world is different.
No kidding. But more on that later, with both barrels.
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.
Ooo, mystical. My bones are shaking, help me! Our bodies may not live there, but our endocrine systems sure do...
We are creating a world that all may enter without privilege or prejudice accorded by race, economic power, military force, or station of birth.
Right, only by ISP and spelling and punctuation ability. This paragraph is where I decided I finally had to come out and call bullshit to this whole thing. And how many of the people on the mailing lists that claim to be full of internet liberators, free-speech advocates, people who are "building cyberspace" etc look at something posted by, say, an AOL account, with the same level of fair judgement as they do a .stanford.edu or some well-known company name? How many postings with good ideas have been publicly ridiculed on any number of lists and newsgroups because of spelling or punctuation errors? How many posts with an obviously female account name have been publicly denigrated with "wow, you must be PMS today"? How about "we are creating a world that all may enter without privilege or prejudice as long as they conform to certain literary standards, have a gender-neutral account name, and don't take potshots at any sacred net.religious institutions such as 'cancel poodles' (ah those paragons of democratic free speech), flame wars, and the utterly omniscient and fair judgement of the net.gods, who have proven themselves in the majority of cases to have written prodigious network utilities and made major technical contributions, and therefore must be reasonable, impartial, and pure of heart."
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.
I'm rolling on the floor, but I'm not sure if I'm laughing or crying. WHAT PLANET ARE YOU FROM? Can someone take an anonymous poll of the Known Network and ask the following: "I routinely refrain from posting my opinions or beliefs to mailing lists and/or newsgroups for fear of flaming, harrassment, or ridicule, even when I am confident of those beliefs or opinions (strongly-disagree disagree no-opinion agree strongly-agree)" Think about how many mailing list or newsgroup communities are real communities, and how rare they are, and how they go downhill because "too many people hear about it" and people stop feeling that they can participate fully without fear of squelching. Hell, look what the cypherpunk community did to Detweiler! I've never met the man, but I've read his papers and he doesn't seem like a total nut case to me. It's one thing to ostracize someone, but baiting them is going a little far. Similar things have happened in many online communities. "Yeah, there are some real nut cases out there, and sooner or later a big enough community runs into them". Even if we accept that, does that mean we have to handle them with a complete lack of compassion? Do we have to be little boys with sticks tormenting a wounded animal? I don't think so.
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.
Awesome. Among other things, all those .sigs saying that the Microsoft Network consents to such-and-such fees if they redist this message, or that this message is copyright the Extropy Inc folks if it appears on this list, etc are just hot air, and those folks won't mind it. For that matter, source code copyrights on the net are just a quaint custom, and so are people's personal privacy expectations with regard to their email and to their files. I mean, electronic privacy isn't a concept of property, identity, or expression is it? What's all this fuss about crypto? Silly people, those legal concepts don't apply here!!! Now go read your users mail like a good sysadmin and turn in heretics to the thought police. Mr. Barlow says it's okay, right here in this widely-forwarded document! Now I understand why there is no fear of the plug being pulled-- so what if this message is being read on a physical screen and is stored on a physical disk, with a physical junction joining it to the network, "there is no matter here". The fact that the computer on which you read this may belong to someone else, may be shut down without your control, may be being misused according to their intent just by transmitting this message, that is irrelevant! OMMMMMMM-- are you receiving this message? OMMMMMMMM....
Our identities have no bodies, so, unlike you, we cannot obtain order by physical coercion.
The persons we have kicked off numerous online services, such as Cantor & Seigel, email harrassers, stalkers, etc are not really "us", so this statement is entirely self-consistent, Selah.
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.
Even if we don't apply it universally to ourselves, only to those online bodiless entities who meet with our approval and are clearly also members of the intellectual and anarchic elite!
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.
Why yes. Bad law on a bad situation does not make it right. Again, I agree here.
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.
Cool. I wonder how much hate mail I will get for this commentary? Perhaps I will be immediately dismissed as a) not a member of the technical elite of netdom or hackerdom, and therefore clueless b) an outsider, ditto (hey, I've only been on the net since 1981, I'm just a pup; and I never became a netnews household word) c) a woman, who is probably on the rag
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.
Set BOLE generators on HYPER, captain. Aye aye! Please. This sort of thing is so riddled with inaccuracies, hypocrisy, half-truths, and the occasional kernel of absolute correctness that it ought to be taken out and shot. Where are *our* "parental responsibilities" to network newcomers, to AOL and the Microsoft Network people (to name a few)? How many of the self-avowed denizens of cyberspace feel like "natives" in the "real world"? How many decent politicians do you think are out there trying to do their job and being confronted with only a single tarbrush of shirking spineless cowardice? Yes, I should give up my political career and the hope of building new housing in my district, getting more school funding, etc for a bunch of twenty (or thirty)-something non-constitutents who think of me as a pustulent gastropod. I'll run right out and vote against TRA!! How much do you go out of your way for people who openly despise you and publicly declare your stupidity with every other breath?
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.
PTHTHT. Take a look at the hierarchic network structure. Have you made your BIND mods yet to allow alternate root-level nameservers? Tsk tsk-- how will people find you after your domain name gets taken out of the InterNIC servers and your ISP is forced to pull your network number or get shut down? Or rather, how will other people besides your group of fellow net.elite peers find you?
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.
See copyright issues in various places above. And what the hell are you referring to by "ideas as an industrial product"? It sounds very noble, but it has little to do with freedom of speech on the net! As we have all seen, many industrial products ranging from inflatable sheep to magazines as respectable as the "New Yorker" don't have to conform to the provisions of the TRA. And the "global conveyance of thought" hasn't needed factories ever. Broadcast communications media have sufficed, ranging from newspapers to radio to satellite TV.
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.
Isn't that special. Not all of us can afford to go to Switzerland, John.
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.
We've got a hell of a lot of work to do, then. Let's start by not flaming people at the drop of a hat. Perhaps I myself am guilty of this-- everyone who flames thinks they have a good enough reason. But unlike some people, I've never claimed to be a superior being.
Davos, Switzerland February 8, 1996
John Perry Barlow, Cognitive Dissident
************ I don't know what the "right" things to do are to protect free speech on the net. I'm trying to figure that out, like many of you. I do know, or rather, passionately believe, that missives like this Declaration are a major red herring. Every person who takes his or her five minutes to forward this to another mailing list or to his or her congresscritter is wasting time and helping to promote an impression of the net as a place full of immature, unrealistic people. Find something original and concrete to do instead. Spend the five minutes writing and *mailing* an original letter to your elected official and mention you are in his or her district. Write a non-judgemental, helpful explanation of something to a net newcomer. Install PGP on your roomate's machine and teach him/her how to use it. Take an hour to write and post a refutation to a meme which you think will harm the net community. Just go DO something. It's a hard thing to face, that armed persons might come to your door and shut down your livelihood and your main access to your chosen community of friends, and possibly shoot you or your loved ones in the process. The sooner we face and deal with that fear in ourselves, and use that transformative power to direct our actions for individual and collective freedom, the better. Pretending we are ruling a powerful invisible empire which is immune to violence is not the way to get there. Get real about the virtual. 2/11/96 M. Strata Rose strata@virtual.net Copyright 1996 M. Strata Rose. This message may be forwarded in its entirety as long as this notice is retained. -----BEGIN PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK----- Version: 2.6.2 mQBtAzDquVEAAAEDAJzWZyzHAO92FpvwUFrGNk3LCHRsTu4BT+scMw/3CdJtWoCB 9HGoj8N/4jLE0kjJH+2iNT0nvfHCjJbd7s1wXUbKcjoJBi6+mUJIe+mjyyjMxuyz ulM1UdqyunAFqCBz1QAFEbQjTS4gU3RyYXRhIFJvc2UgPHN0cmF0YUB2aXJ0dWFs Lm5ldD4= =x64T -----END PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK----- ************************************************************************* M. Strata Rose strata@virtual.net VirtualNet Consulting 408-534-3714 Unix & Internet Administration since 1983 http://www.virtual.net/ *** Better Business Bureau member *** *************************************************************************