Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace is 20 years old

“Governments of the Industrial World, you are tired 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 sovereignty where we are gathered

... 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 neither the moral right to rule over us, nor the methods of coercion that could really frighten us. ”
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So begins the famous Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace ( translated into Russian), which proclaimed the independence of the Internet from the power of national governments - a classic Internet libertarianism. For her time she became a real revelation. The short, but capacious text of John Perry Barlow very quickly became famous and was widely distributed on the Web.


John Perry Barlow is the author of the Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace, the founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the author of the texts of the Grateful Dead group.

In the current era of total surveillance of the NSA, the Great Chinese firewall, continuous state censorship, someone can take the Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace for the arrogant bluster of the Romantic era.

But Barlow himself still does not reject these theses: he is confident in them just as he was twenty years ago. Then the Internet was considered as a toy for a few fans, no more than amateur radio. Only a small caste of advanced computer scientists - the so-called "Digerati" - believed that the Internet would change the future of all mankind.

“The main thing that I stated then was this: cyberspace by nature has immunity to the supreme power and always will,” says John Perry Barlow, who is now 68 years old, in an interview with Wired. “I believed it then, and I believe it now.”

Twenty years ago, media moguls, having a powerful lobby in power, tried to present the Internet as a kind of threat to public morality and security. The US Congress passed the Communications Decency Act, which introduced Internet censorship. John Barlow remarks that most of those who voted to adopt this Act never held a keyboard in their hands. From the side of “Digerati”, the new law was perceived as a perfidious invasion of their territory.

“You declare that we have problems that you must solve. You use this statement as a pretext for invading our lands. Many of these problems do not exist. In the same place where there are real conflicts and shortcomings, we will identify and eliminate them by our own means. We establish our own Social Contract. This method of government will arise according to the conditions of ours, and not of your world. Our world is different. ”

The Communications Decency Act was signed by President Clinton on February 8, 1996. On that day, John Perry Barlow was in Davos (Switzerland) at the World Economic Forum. It was there that he wrote what became known as the Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace — and sent out 600 to his friends. Soon, the text was published on tens of thousands of websites, and Barlow himself was flooded with megabytes of emails.

He did not set the task of “freeing the Internet”, because, in his opinion, the Internet was and remains free. He simply wanted to explain from which positions "digerati" relate to the freedom of the Internet. It was a new philosophy, the so-called Internet libertarianism.

Despite criticism and calls for correcting the original Declaration , introducing the thesis of cooperation with governments, Barlow firmly adheres to the original central thesis that the Internet is a separate global space without borders that divide states and give them power in their territories.

The absence of state power is shown by examples of Wikileaks, Silk Road and others (although Ross Ulbricht was arrested, but others continued his case). Governments simply do not have and cannot have real control here, no matter how they try.

The most convincing example is the senseless efforts of a copyright lobby, which for decades has been trying in vain to defend their rights to digital files on the Internet. John Perry Barlow emphasizes that "the very concept of ownership on the Internet has received a serious blow."

In theory, governments can seize a server or arrest a person, thus invading the Internet. But Cyberspace does not encourage this kind of behavior. Encryption tools appear, programs like Tor, Signal, and so on. “I can talk quite freely with Edward Snowden any time I want, despite the fact that I’m sure the NSA guys would like to know when and what we are talking about” - this also proves that the governments of the physical world There is no real power on the Internet.

John Barlow is still dreaming of a world in which every person can express his point of view, however unpopular it may be, without fear and official permission. A world where everyone can decide what to listen to and know. In this world, intelligence will become the main economic resource, and the physical location of a citizen of Cyberspace will not matter.