A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace

Way back in February, 1996, John Perry Barlow uploaded his "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.

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.

Davos, Switzerland

February 8, 1996

Is LL trying to shut people up?

We wonder if LL was trying to stop a demo outside the FN HQ in Piedmont tonight. After several avs reported that someone was trying to tp them out of the region, LL announced that the region was closing imminently. Stifling descent? Technical problems?

Channel 4 reports on Anarchism in SL

Watch the UK's Channel 4 report on Anarchy in SL

A busy night...

Real World Links

Decadence: A polite look into Australia's ineffective representative "democracy" and the suppression of dissidents in recent years.

Murray Bookchin Interview on YouTube. Very clear explanation of the reasoning behind his moves away from Stalinism, Marxism and Trotskism and toward anarchism.

Peter Ludlow's Crypto Anarchy, Cyberstates, and Pirate Utopias: read a review and find links to the book here.

The International Project for a Participatory Society: a group of activists, writers, media producers, and others committed to the basic principles and values of solidarity, diversity, equity, self management.

Anarchy Archives: An online research center on the history and theory of anarchism.

Wade Davis on TED Talks: In this stunning talk, National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence Wade Davis celebrates the extraordinary diversity of the world's indigenous cultures.


The Libsecondlife project is an effort directed at understanding how Second Life works from a technical perspective, and extending and integrating the metaverse with the rest of the web.

Anarchist Federation: aims to abolish Capitalism and all oppression to create a free and equal society.

Globalise Resistance: Globalise Resistance brings together groups and individuals opposed to the global growth of corporate power.

Harold Pinter's Nobel Lecture

CWI: The CWI is part of the struggle to overthrow the rule of big business and global capitalism.

The Power of Nightmares (video) [part 1] [part 2] [part 3]: In the past our politicians offered us dreams of a better world. Now they promise to protect us from nightmares. The most frightening of these is the threat of an international terror network. But just as the dreams were not true, neither are these nightmares.

Post-Soviet Lessons for a Post-American Century (essay) [part 1] [part 2] [part 3]: "the collapse of the Soviet Union could be viewed as a dress rehearsal for what is to come"

The EFF: working to protect your digital rights.