The initial dream of the Internet

An widely distributed early manifesto regarding the independence of the Internet was published on February 8, 1996 from Davos, Switzerland by by John Perry Barlow - founder of Electronic Frontier Foundation. The Declaration sets out, in sixteen short paragraphs, a rebuttal to government of the Internet by any outside force. Steemit functions on this principle, being a decentralized community based on voluntary exchange of its own crypto-currency -- Steem Dollars.

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.

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.

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.

This speech is from 1996 and it seems a bit silly, amazingly nieve but also kind of right in some ways about how the internet turned out so far, since the takeover of big corporations, advertising agencies and governments across the world.

Communities, rather than individuals, should be more intellectually empowered to create, but lately we have been watching the force of the solo, the age of the ego. Steemit turns to the initial dream of the Internet.

Thank you, Steemit, for the opportunity to truly make the Internet great again!