The release of new social and political energy should lead to freedom of information and human choice. Only the user decides! And then four years later - in 1996 - the light saw the "Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace" by John Perry Barlow. A characteristic feature of the work is radical views that bring the idea of cryptoanarchism to the virtual civilization of Consciousness. From the first lines striking pomposity of the syllable, if you like, the prohibitive degree of pathos. All this speaks for a strong emotional foundation, and for this there were prerequisites. The World Economic Forum in Davos and the attempt by the US Congress to adopt the law "On the Decency of Communications", which regulates the dissemination of pornography and other unfavorable information on the Internet, are factors that play a decisive role in limiting Barlow's freedom. As a result, we see a pretentious manifesto calling on users to change their outlook and act as builders of a new society.
"Governments of the Industrial World, you are weary giants of flesh and steel; My homeland is Cyberspace, the new home of Consciousness. On behalf of the future, I ask you, who have everything in the past, - leave us alone. You are superfluous among us. You do not have supreme authority where we are gathered. We did not elect a government, and it is unlikely that we will ever have it, so I appeal to you, having power not greater than that with which freedom itself speaks. I declare that the global public space that we are building, by its nature, regardless of the tyranny that you seek to impose on us. You have no moral right to rule over us, no coercive methods that really could frighten us.
The true strength of governments is the consent of those whom they rule. You did not ask for or receive our consent. We did not invite you. You do not know either us or our world. Cyberspace lies beyond your borders. Do not think that you can build it, as if it were an object of state building. You are not capable of this. Cyberspace is a matter of nature and grows by itself through our collective actions.
You are not involved in our great and ever-expanding conversation; Do not you create the wealth of our markets. You do not know our culture, our ethics and unwritten laws, which already provide our society with more order than one that can be achieved by your punishments and bans. You state that we have problems that you must solve. You use this statement as an excuse for invading our lands. Many of these problems do not exist. Wherever there are real conflicts and shortcomings, we will identify and eliminate them by our own means. We establish our own Public Contract. This way of government will arise according to our conditions, not your world. Our world is different.
Cyberspace consists of interactions and relationships, thinks and builds itself like a standing wave in the intertwining of our communications. Our world is everywhere and nowhere, but not where our bodies live. We create a world in which all can enter without privileges and discrimination, regardless of skin color, economic or military might and place of birth. We create a world in which anyone, anywhere, can express their opinions, no matter how extravagant they may be, without fear that he or she will be forced to silence or to agree with the opinion of the majority.
Your legal notions of property, expression, personality, movement and context are inapplicable to us. They are based on matter - there is no matter here. Our personalities do not have bodies, therefore, unlike you, we can not achieve order through physical coercion. We believe that our way of government will arise on the basis of ethics, enlightened selfishness and the common good. Our people can cover much that is in your jurisdiction. The only law that is recognized by virtually all of the included cultures is the Golden Rule. We hope that we will be able to find private solutions based on this general principle. But we can not make decisions that you are trying to impose. Now you have created in the United States a law - the Telecommunications Reform Act - that rejects your own constitution and offends the dreams of Jefferson, Washington, Mill, Madison, de Tocqueville and Brandes. These dreams must now be born again in us. You are horrified at your own children, because they feel at home in a world in which you will always be immigrants. Since you are afraid of them, you are cowardly shifting their parental responsibilities to a bureaucratic apparatus. In our world, all feelings and sayings, from the lowest to the angelic, are parts of a single whole - a global conversation in bits. We can not separate the air that suffocates, from the air, over which the wings beat.
In China, Germany, France, Russia, Singapore, Italy and the United States, you are trying to establish information quarantine in order to prevent the spread of the free-thinking virus by erecting outposts on the borders of Cyberspace. These measures can contain the epidemic for a while, but in a world that will soon be covered by communication media carrying bits, they will not work.
Your increasingly aging information industry would like to perpetuate its dominance by enacting laws - both in America and elsewhere - requiring ownership of the speech itself throughout the world. These laws proclaim that ideas are just another industrial product, noble no more than cast-iron chutes. In our own world, everything that the human mind can create, can be reproduced and spread to infinity without any payment. For a global transfer of thought, your plants are no longer required.
These increasingly hostile colonial measures put us in a situation in which the adherents of freedom and self-determination, who were forced to reject the authority of a remote, uniform power, appeared in their time. We must proclaim the freedom of our virtual "I" from your dominion, even if we agree that you continue to rule over our bodies.
We will spread our "I" on the whole planet so that no one can arrest our thoughts. We will create in Cyberspace a civilization of Consciousness. May it be more humane and more honest than the peace that your governments created before " (Source)
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