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 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. 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. We cannot separate the air that chokes from the air upon which wings beat. 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. Because you fear them, you entrust your bureaucracies with the parental responsibilities you are too cowardly to confront yourselves. You are terrified of your own children, since they are natives in a world where you will always be immigrants. These dreams must now be born anew in us. 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. But we cannot accept the solutions you are attempting to impose. We hope we will be able to build our particular solutions on that basis. The only law that all our constituent cultures would generally recognize is the Golden Rule. Our identities may be distributed across many of your jurisdictions. We believe that from ethics, enlightened self-interest, and the commonweal, our governance will emerge. Our identities have no bodies, so, unlike you, we cannot obtain order by physical coercion. They are all based on matter, and there is no matter here. Your legal concepts of property, expression, identity, movement, and context do not apply to us. 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. We are creating a world that all may enter without privilege or prejudice accorded by race, economic power, military force, or station of birth. Ours is a world that is both everywhere and nowhere, but it is not where bodies live. Our world is different.Ĭyberspace consists of transactions, relationships, and thought itself, arrayed like a standing wave in the web of our communications. This governance will arise according to the conditions of our world, not yours. Where there are real conflicts, where there are wrongs, we will identify them and address them by our means. You use this claim as an excuse to invade our precincts. You claim there are problems among us that you need to solve. 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 have not engaged in our great and gathering conversation, nor did you create the wealth of our marketplaces. It is an act of nature and it grows itself through our collective actions. Do not think that you can build it, as though it were a public construction project. Cyberspace does not lie within your borders. You do not know us, nor do you know our world. You have neither solicited nor received ours. Governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. You have no moral right to rule us nor do you possess any methods of enforcement we have true reason to fear. I declare the global social space we are building to be naturally independent of the tyrannies you seek to impose on us. 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. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind.
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