A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace
[I threw this together using a piece of text I found on the internet and ideas from my own brain. The first part which serves as the prelude to the Constitution I wrote is credited to John perry Barlow, the second part (with the decrees in Roman numerals) to bitBullets. I encourage anyone who wants to, to add to this and expand on it and make suggestions. This is in response to a number of things, particularly to SOPA and PROTECTIP and the general mood of online rebellion that seems to be filling the air these days. Thanks for reading.]
A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace
by John Perry Barlow <[email protected]>
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.
The Constitution of the Internet
by: Bitbullets
The internet is a machine, much like the 205 nation-states around the world today, a machine powered by many machines. The internet is a union of millions of servers powered by a conscious citizenry. Without online citizens the internet cannot exist, just as the 205 nation-states cannot exist without their citizens. With regulation and censorship the citizens of the internet cannot thrive and reach their full potential, just as the citizens of the 205 nation-states around the globe cannot thrive under the tyranny of a police state. It is the trend that the lives of many global citizens are going online. It is the trend that more children are being born citizens of the global entity that is the internet more than citizens of physical geography. It is the case that many of our citizens spend more time participating in the online community of the internet than in their national communities. It is the case that our identities, our lives, our relationships are now defined by online interactions, but we do not necessarily have the same freedoms online as we do in the physical world. We the people of the internet have decided that we must claim the independence of the internet from foreign regulation and censorship in order to facilitate our freedoms and privacy as citizens of the internet.
I. Our online privacy is first and foremost essential to our safe and free participation in the online community. It is thus necessary that every citizen of the internet be able to browse anonymously without being tracked by governments, ISPs, corporations, institutions or any individuals.
II. Online tracking by websites and servers must be permission-based to ensure the privacy of our citizens.
III. It is our belief that no single machine is specially protected by any Earthly laws from the intrusion by other machines within the internet. The citizens who operate each machine within the system are solely responsible for the security of their machine and any intrusion by an individual, organization or government cannot be punished by Earthly laws.
IV. Security of individual machines within the internet will thus be self-regulating. Punishment for unjust intrusions will be dealt by public retaliation. No unjust intrusion will go unpunished.
V. No foreign governing body, organization, corporation, church or any other institution may censor our freedom of speech as citizens of the internet except by tools and methods that are publically available and accessible to all individuals with access to the internet.
VI. Once information has reached the internet these same institutions may not impede by any means, censor or regulation included, the free flow of information on the internet, as impeding our access to information would effectively be limiting our free speech.
VII. Any attempt to censor information on the internet will be met with public outcry leading to further propagation of the censored information. The internet will employ mirrored websites, public torrents or whatever mode of reproduction is deemed necessary to the protection of our free speech.
VIII. The products of the mind cannot be considered property and the free flow of intellect on the internet is necessary for the flourishing of truth and free speech.
IX. The citizens of the internet will regulate their own speech. That which is deemed good and true will proliferate and that which is deemed bad will fail and die.
X. The internet must remain open, fair and neutral, to maximize potential for innovation, proliferation of ideas and speech which is good and true. Any attempts to affect the neutrality of the internet by Earthly law will amount to a limitation of our free speech.
XI. The internet must remain a bastion of free speech and a legitimate means by which citizens can criticize Earthly institutions.
XII. In shedding the regulatory thumb of the foreign governments the internet will become a bastion of true self-regulated anarchic democracy, where conflict is resolved through the court of public opinion.
XIII. Any attempts by foreign governing bodies, corporations, organizations, churches or any other institution to limit our free speech will ultimately fail, as all have before. We will continue to build the infrastructure necessary to circumvent your regulations faster than you can censor us.
XIV. It is our conviction that any attempt to limit our free speech and invade our privacy, through legislation, executive power, or corporate monopoly, will be met with a general strike, shutting down the vast marketplaces of the internet.
titsay
gummygunk
prguitarman
dededos
blakekathryn
dailybridgerton
tangentwithtanner
andulkaphoto
janainaart
