The Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace (1996)

Cerpin Taxt · 02-09-2011, 10:48 PM

http://english.aljazeera.net/indepth...628223660.html

Quote:

The declaration of 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.

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 recognise 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 civilisation of the Mind in Cyberspace. May it be more humane and fair than the world your governments have made before.

Davos, Switzerland
February 8, 1996

The Rev · 02-09-2011, 11:44 PM

God bless Wikileaks. Information wants to be free, and now, information about abuse of power can be. It will be very soon when it cannot NOT be, and when that day comes, all abuse must necessarily end.

The Rev

Cerpin Taxt · 02-10-2011, 07:26 AM

I think the boiling point will be reached in our lifetime.. very exciting stuff.

**SageTree** · 02-10-2011, 08:04 AM

What would the Egyptian event looked like in Canada and the US?

Roach · 02-10-2011, 07:37 PM

^ Battle of Gettysburg

I get the impression that the writer of this declaration....

1.Never actually made anything with his own hands.

2.never served in any military.

3. is a programmer (with a really really swelled head.)

4.gets hiis daily doses of reality only from television.

.

...american television

Roach · 02-10-2011, 07:41 PM

Quote:

It will be very soon when it cannot NOT be,

google and verizon are trying do do this very thing, as we speak.

fenderbender · 02-10-2011, 08:30 PM

good read.

Some very true words...

**SageTree** · 02-11-2011, 05:37 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Roach

^ Battle of Gettysburg

NO!!!!!!!

The correct answer is: Wal-Mart on Black Friday....

NEXT TOPIC!!!
Who put the bomp, In the bomp bah bomp bah bomp?
Who put the ram,In the rama lama ding dong?
Who put the bop, In the bop shoo bop shoo bop?
Who put the dip, In the dip da dip da dip?

02-09-2011, 11:44 PM	#2 (permalink)
The Rev Clear Light Join Date: Oct 2002 Location: In my head, somewhere. Posts: 17,864 Thanks: 5,015 Thanked 5,419 Times in 2,864 Posts	God bless Wikileaks. Information wants to be free, and now, information about abuse of power can be. It will be very soon when it cannot NOT be, and when that day comes, all abuse must necessarily end. The Rev __________________ Budforce - My Friend August 29, 1973- May 25, 2012

02-10-2011, 07:26 AM	#3 (permalink)
Cerpin Taxt Yahookan Zealot Join Date: Jun 2002 Location: Canada Posts: 7,213 Blog Entries: 1 Thanks: 843 Thanked 1,919 Times in 1,011 Posts	I think the boiling point will be reached in our lifetime.. very exciting stuff. __________________ Step Back. Evaluate. Recognize. "All memory is really a form of regurgitation of undigested experience." -Alan Watts

02-10-2011, 08:04 AM	#4 (permalink)
SageTree ~Kalyāṇa-mitrā~ Join Date: Sep 2000 Location: In Love Posts: 23,414 Blog Entries: 26 Thanks: 13,070 Thanked 6,767 Times in 4,664 Posts	What would the Egyptian event looked like in Canada and the US? __________________ "What's oppressive is letting your life be confined by old definitions of what everything is." -Zen Meister my_scatterheart YaHooka is.... Cannabis lovers from around the world pulling up a comfy chair, picking up a vaporizer, a bong, a brownie, a pipe, or a joint, getting high, stoned, buzzed or healthy. Uniting our minds in conversation...While Portraying a Positive Image of marijuana and marijuana users to the world. Treat your fellow YaHookans with kindness,respect and tolerance.

02-10-2011, 07:37 PM	#5 (permalink)
Roach Victoria Aut Mors Join Date: Dec 1999 Posts: 7,182 Thanks: 2,372 Thanked 1,985 Times in 1,508 Posts	^ Battle of Gettysburg I get the impression that the writer of this declaration.... 1.Never actually made anything with his own hands. 2.never served in any military. 3. is a programmer (with a really really swelled head.) 4.gets hiis daily doses of reality only from television. . ...american television __________________ לזיין את הקופים

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