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A Declaration of the

Independence of Cyberspace

John P. Barlow

Publication originale sur le site web de lEFF, 9 fvrier 1996. Versionfranaise sur ce site web. Publi avec autorisation de lauteur.

Yesterday, that great invertebrate in the White House si-gned into the law the Telecom Reform Act of 1996, whileTipper Gore took digital photographs of the proceedingsto be included in a book called 24 Hours in Cyberspace.

I had also been asked to participate in the creation ofthis book by writing something appropriate to the mo-ment. Given the atrocity that this legislation would seekto inflict on the Net, I decided it was as good a time asany to dump some tea in the virtual harbor.

After all, the Telecom Reform Act, passed in the Se-nate with only 5 dissenting votes, makes it unlawful, andpunishable by a $250,000 to say shit online. Or, for thatmatter, to say any of the other 7 dirty words prohibitedin broadcast media. Or to discuss abortion openly. Or totalk about any bodily function in any but the most clinicalterms.

It attempts to place more restrictive constraints on theconversation in Cyberspace than presently exist in the Se-nate cafeteria, where I have dined and heard colorful in-decencies spoken by United States senators on every oc-casion I did.

This bill was enacted upon us by people who haventthe slightest idea who we are or where our conversationis being conducted. It is, as my good friend and WiredEditor Louis Rossetto put it, as though the illiterate couldtell 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 owndefense.

I have written something (with characteristic grandio-sity) that I hope will become one of many means to thisend. If you find it useful, I hope you will pass it on as wi-dely as possible. You can leave my name off it if you like,because I dont care about the credit. I really dont.

But I do hope this cry will echo across Cyberspace, chan-ging and growing and self-replicating, until it becomesa great shout equal to the idiocy they have just inflictedupon us.

I give you...

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace

It is error alone which needs the support ofgovernment. Truth can stand by itself. Thomas Jefferson, Notes on Virginia

Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giantsof flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new homeof Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past toleave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You haveno sovereignty where we gather.

We have no elected government, nor are we likely tohave one, so I address you with no greater authority thanthat with which liberty itself always speaks. I declare theglobal social space we are building to be naturally inde-pendent of the tyrannies you seek to impose on us. Youhave no moral right to rule us nor do you possess any me-thods of enforcement we have true reason to fear.

Governments derive their just powers from the consentof the governed. You have neither solicited nor received

ours. We did not invite you. You do not know us, nor doyou know our world. Cyberspace does not lie within yourborders. Do not think that you can build it, as though it

were a public construction project. You cannot. It is an actof nature and it grows itself through our collective actions.

You have not engaged in our great and gatheringconversation, nor did you create the wealth of our mar-ketplaces. You do not know our culture, our ethics, or theunwritten codes that already provide our society more or-der than could be obtained by any of your impositions.

You claim there are problems among us that you needto solve. You use this claim as an excuse to invade our

precincts. Many of these problems dont exist. Where thereare real conflicts, where there are wrongs, we will identifythem and address them by our means. We are forming ourown Social Contract . This governance will arise accordingto the conditions of our world, not yours. Our world isdifferent.

Cyberspace consists of transactions, relationships, andthought itself, arrayed like a standing wave in the web ofour communications. Ours is a world that is both everyw-here and nowhere, but it is not where bodies live.

We are creating a world that all may enter without pri-vilege or prejudice accorded by race, economic power, mi-litary force, or station of birth.

We are creating a world where anyone, anywhere mayexpress his or her beliefs, no matter how singular, withoutfear of being coerced into silence or conformity.

Your legal concepts of property, expression, identity,movement, and context do not apply to us. They are basedon matter, There is no matter here.

Our identities have no bodies, so, unlike you, we can-not obtain order by physical coercion. We believe thatfrom ethics, enlightened self-interest, and the common-

weal, our governance will emerge . Our identities may bedistributed across many of your jurisdictions. The only lawthat all our constituent cultures would generally recognize

is the Golden Rule. We hope we will be able to build ourparticular solutions on that basis. But we cannot acceptthe solutions you are attempting to impose.

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In the United States, you have today created a law, theTelecommunications Reform Act, which repudiates yourown 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 arenatives 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 toconfront yourselves. In our world, all the sentiments andexpressions of humanity, from the debasing to the angelic,are parts of a seamless whole, the global conversation ofbits. We cannot separate the air that chokes from the airupon which wings beat.

In China, Germany, France, Russia, Singapore, Italy andthe United States, you are trying to ward off the virus ofliberty by erecting guard posts at the frontiers of Cybers-pace. These may keep out the contagion for a small time,but they will not work in a world that will soon be blan-keted in bit-bearing media.

Your increasingly obsolete information industries wouldperpetuate themselves by proposing laws, in America andelsewhere, that claim to own speech itself throughout the

world. These laws would declare ideas to be another in-dustrial product, no more noble than pig iron. In our

world, whatever the human mind may create can be re-produced and distributed infinitely at no cost. The globalconveyance of thought no longer requires your factoriesto accomplish.

These increasingly hostile and colonial measures placeus in the same position as those previous lovers of freedomand self-determination who had to reject the authorities ofdistant, uninformed powers. We must declare our virtualselves immune to your sovereignty, even as we continueto consent to your rule over our bodies. We will spreadourselves across the Planet so that no one can arrest ourthoughts.

We will create a civilization of the Mind in Cyberspace.May it be more humane and fair than the world your go-

vernments have made before.

c 1996 Hache et les auteurs sauf indication contrairehttp://editions-hache.com/[PDF 6 avril 2007]

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