Comments on A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace
While I strongly support free speech of every kind and support the spirit of the "A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace", I do find some of the simplifications and assumptions of this "mini-festo" to be problematic. The following are my comments on A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace:
1.0 A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace
1.1 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.
[dc] Mr. Barlow lives in the meatspace and speaks from meatspace, his voice is "mediated" by a telecommunications protocol, created and maintained by entities existing in meatspace. How can mr Barlow portend to speak for a future that has not even happened yet and represent a concensus of people, let alone say who is welcome or not welcome on a communications medium? It is patently untrue that governments, in particular the US governement have no sovereignty over a communication medium they created for the American people, with taxpayer monies. It is their job, and their mandate to manage the network they have created for our benefit.
1.2 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.
[dc] While it is agreed that governments do not have moral rights to impinge upon free speech in any sphere, they do in fact have methodologies for enforcement and ultimately the power to pulll the plug if even by force. I am also of the opinion that governments WILL pull the plug by force if necessary if they feel that this medium of commuincation threatens their survival. The sad fact is that cultural conflicts over sexuality, obscenity will inspire many well meaning people to support this possibility.
1.3 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.
[dc] It is a debabable point where governent derive their power in practical terms, however if that much is true, it IS the governments job, given to them by the people to regulate industries in some ways otherwise the FCC would not exist at all. Cyberspace lies on servers, all of which exist within some governmental border. However true wirelss peer to peer networks are a different story. While "cyberspace" is a recent form of commuinication, it is populated by the same human beings with the same issues they have had since the beginning. All human social development is an act of nature and grows organically even if attempts are made to manage that growth in certain directions. People always dream up ways of using any tool that the inventor never could have predicted.
1.4 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.
[dc] Governemts whether in service to the people or not, are accustomed to framing the conversation and so called democratic governemnts provide for mechanisms in which smaller groups or individuals might participate in conversation with government. These would be the legislative and judicial branches of governemnt and the electorial system. So in essence, edicts like the the CDA ARE governmental conversation in effect. It is another debatable point how intertwined the government is in busines in this country, and whether the fact that government programs (funded by the people) that created the possibility of "cyberspace" share in the credit to disown this is to disown the power of the people over this region since business has moved in and made its voice heard. Further, the unwritten codes that govern net society vary just like all cultural speech and performance, once again in a free society we elect/appoint people to intervene for the collective good, to not do so is to leave individuals open to an even greater evil that posesses no incentive to respect the rights of individuals, that being free market capital. Do not forget that the open environment the author suggests by definition is a liberatarian world where business has the same open rights to exploit as they see fit.
1.5 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.
[dc} There is only one world, that is seen differently though differnt eyes. We all live in it and simply communicate through different means. The net is only one means of commuication and the more I think about it, the less the "new world" with "new rules" constuct fits. The net is not the only means of communication that should be free and this new social contract should be with all citizens, not only ones who posess the luxury of internet communications. It is anthropomorphisizing to imbue a communication medium with "worldhood" and serves to further divide humans instead of unite them. What the author is suggesting is that net citizens are somehow exempt from intervention of the world onto a very exclusive communications medium.
1.6 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.
[dc] Telepresence, pseudonymity and other benefits of a communication medium are not indicators of a new world, but a form of communication part of a whole. Making a differentiation between where bodies live and where minds live is self defeating, further divisive and removes the onus of physical accountability for individuals employing a more advanced communications medium.
1.7 We are creating a world that all may enter without privilege or prejudice accorded by race, economic power, military force, or station of birth.
[dc] This is simply not true. Only the priviledged few can communicate with high technology, which itself is a product of military technology and economic incentive. All of these things, like human social organizations, have prejudice built into them.
1.8 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.
[dc] once again, these are some (like myself) that hold these rights to be basic human rights regardless of what medium of communication.
1.9 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.
[dc] another bogus statement. Property does not have to be connected to matter at all. Intellectual property is a great key to prosperity in modern times. Identity may metamorphosize but still remains a key tool for relations and context does not become a null concept just because something is translated into http protocol and put over a wire. Eliminating the individual right to property in this means of commuication is tyranny of another sort. Does the author suppose that business is going to cede any property to this new network? I think not. So why should individuals not have the same rights inside and outside of a communications tool?
2.0 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.
[dc] Agreed about the "solutions" but everything else is idealistic nonsense. Ethics and governance do not simply appear spontaneously for a communications tool. Enlightened self interest is right next door to avarice and neither of them are really all that comfortable with ethics. Governance should exist to regulate and help define the difference between enlightened self interest, fervent selfish interest and harmful monopoly.
2.1 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.
[dc] this act was repealed in part in March of 1997
2.2 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.
[dc] This may be true in some ways but it has always been true in those ways. Here it is used as hyperbole, sheer emotional propoganda. None of these challenges are new to network communications. They are a symptom of the human condition.
2.3 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.
[dc] I hope the author is right here and that freedom of expression in all mediums is too strong to be bridled by repression forever.
2.4 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.
[dc] The communication industry are the parents of the network communications industry. Of course they are going to lobby to increase their marketshare and protect their assets from threats, but this is no different than the silent film industry trying to dismiss the advent ot talking pictures. Further, there is plent of cost. Computers, software, networks bandwidth etc all cost money. What planet is this guy from where these things are free?
2.5 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.
[dc] More emotional hyperbole. The government's job is to do our bidding and regulate industries that might otherwise spin out of control and abuse people for profit. We dont want to be immune to the beneficial aspects of government interention, in fact, somebody needs to be an ally of individual rights in a world where slavery is the pureset form or capitalism. Previous lovers of freedom in America held slaves but it was an enlightened government that outlawed it finally.
2.6 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.
[dc] This author suffers from a bad case of nihilism in their monomaniacal instance that government is imposing something on people that they dont want or need. I the US the governemnt is supposed to work for the people. Ostensibly we elect political tools to do our bidding. The author indicated in so many words that he does not believe this is true, and he might be right, but that is beside the point.
The "we" he refers to in cyperspace is the same we that votes and the same we that calls the police when their store is getting robbed or Exon is dumping chemicals into the gulf of Mexico. The "we" he refers to does not exclude the government, because "we" are supposed to BE the governemnt.
It is silly to expect that this "we" speaks with one voice, and that until we settle issues in meatspace, that "cyberspace" will be any different in how it serves the needs of humanity.
DC Spensley
San Francisco 2006
Davos, Switzerland
February 8, 1996
1.0 A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace
1.1 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.
[dc] Mr. Barlow lives in the meatspace and speaks from meatspace, his voice is "mediated" by a telecommunications protocol, created and maintained by entities existing in meatspace. How can mr Barlow portend to speak for a future that has not even happened yet and represent a concensus of people, let alone say who is welcome or not welcome on a communications medium? It is patently untrue that governments, in particular the US governement have no sovereignty over a communication medium they created for the American people, with taxpayer monies. It is their job, and their mandate to manage the network they have created for our benefit.
1.2 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.
[dc] While it is agreed that governments do not have moral rights to impinge upon free speech in any sphere, they do in fact have methodologies for enforcement and ultimately the power to pulll the plug if even by force. I am also of the opinion that governments WILL pull the plug by force if necessary if they feel that this medium of commuincation threatens their survival. The sad fact is that cultural conflicts over sexuality, obscenity will inspire many well meaning people to support this possibility.
1.3 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.
[dc] It is a debabable point where governent derive their power in practical terms, however if that much is true, it IS the governments job, given to them by the people to regulate industries in some ways otherwise the FCC would not exist at all. Cyberspace lies on servers, all of which exist within some governmental border. However true wirelss peer to peer networks are a different story. While "cyberspace" is a recent form of commuinication, it is populated by the same human beings with the same issues they have had since the beginning. All human social development is an act of nature and grows organically even if attempts are made to manage that growth in certain directions. People always dream up ways of using any tool that the inventor never could have predicted.
1.4 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.
[dc] Governemts whether in service to the people or not, are accustomed to framing the conversation and so called democratic governemnts provide for mechanisms in which smaller groups or individuals might participate in conversation with government. These would be the legislative and judicial branches of governemnt and the electorial system. So in essence, edicts like the the CDA ARE governmental conversation in effect. It is another debatable point how intertwined the government is in busines in this country, and whether the fact that government programs (funded by the people) that created the possibility of "cyberspace" share in the credit to disown this is to disown the power of the people over this region since business has moved in and made its voice heard. Further, the unwritten codes that govern net society vary just like all cultural speech and performance, once again in a free society we elect/appoint people to intervene for the collective good, to not do so is to leave individuals open to an even greater evil that posesses no incentive to respect the rights of individuals, that being free market capital. Do not forget that the open environment the author suggests by definition is a liberatarian world where business has the same open rights to exploit as they see fit.
1.5 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.
[dc} There is only one world, that is seen differently though differnt eyes. We all live in it and simply communicate through different means. The net is only one means of commuication and the more I think about it, the less the "new world" with "new rules" constuct fits. The net is not the only means of communication that should be free and this new social contract should be with all citizens, not only ones who posess the luxury of internet communications. It is anthropomorphisizing to imbue a communication medium with "worldhood" and serves to further divide humans instead of unite them. What the author is suggesting is that net citizens are somehow exempt from intervention of the world onto a very exclusive communications medium.
1.6 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.
[dc] Telepresence, pseudonymity and other benefits of a communication medium are not indicators of a new world, but a form of communication part of a whole. Making a differentiation between where bodies live and where minds live is self defeating, further divisive and removes the onus of physical accountability for individuals employing a more advanced communications medium.
1.7 We are creating a world that all may enter without privilege or prejudice accorded by race, economic power, military force, or station of birth.
[dc] This is simply not true. Only the priviledged few can communicate with high technology, which itself is a product of military technology and economic incentive. All of these things, like human social organizations, have prejudice built into them.
1.8 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.
[dc] once again, these are some (like myself) that hold these rights to be basic human rights regardless of what medium of communication.
1.9 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.
[dc] another bogus statement. Property does not have to be connected to matter at all. Intellectual property is a great key to prosperity in modern times. Identity may metamorphosize but still remains a key tool for relations and context does not become a null concept just because something is translated into http protocol and put over a wire. Eliminating the individual right to property in this means of commuication is tyranny of another sort. Does the author suppose that business is going to cede any property to this new network? I think not. So why should individuals not have the same rights inside and outside of a communications tool?
2.0 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.
[dc] Agreed about the "solutions" but everything else is idealistic nonsense. Ethics and governance do not simply appear spontaneously for a communications tool. Enlightened self interest is right next door to avarice and neither of them are really all that comfortable with ethics. Governance should exist to regulate and help define the difference between enlightened self interest, fervent selfish interest and harmful monopoly.
2.1 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.
[dc] this act was repealed in part in March of 1997
2.2 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.
[dc] This may be true in some ways but it has always been true in those ways. Here it is used as hyperbole, sheer emotional propoganda. None of these challenges are new to network communications. They are a symptom of the human condition.
2.3 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.
[dc] I hope the author is right here and that freedom of expression in all mediums is too strong to be bridled by repression forever.
2.4 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.
[dc] The communication industry are the parents of the network communications industry. Of course they are going to lobby to increase their marketshare and protect their assets from threats, but this is no different than the silent film industry trying to dismiss the advent ot talking pictures. Further, there is plent of cost. Computers, software, networks bandwidth etc all cost money. What planet is this guy from where these things are free?
2.5 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.
[dc] More emotional hyperbole. The government's job is to do our bidding and regulate industries that might otherwise spin out of control and abuse people for profit. We dont want to be immune to the beneficial aspects of government interention, in fact, somebody needs to be an ally of individual rights in a world where slavery is the pureset form or capitalism. Previous lovers of freedom in America held slaves but it was an enlightened government that outlawed it finally.
2.6 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.
[dc] This author suffers from a bad case of nihilism in their monomaniacal instance that government is imposing something on people that they dont want or need. I the US the governemnt is supposed to work for the people. Ostensibly we elect political tools to do our bidding. The author indicated in so many words that he does not believe this is true, and he might be right, but that is beside the point.
The "we" he refers to in cyperspace is the same we that votes and the same we that calls the police when their store is getting robbed or Exon is dumping chemicals into the gulf of Mexico. The "we" he refers to does not exclude the government, because "we" are supposed to BE the governemnt.
It is silly to expect that this "we" speaks with one voice, and that until we settle issues in meatspace, that "cyberspace" will be any different in how it serves the needs of humanity.
DC Spensley
San Francisco 2006
Davos, Switzerland
February 8, 1996
posted by DanCoyote at 1:29 PM
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