网络独立宣言[美] 约翰·P. 巴洛 A DECLARATION OF THE INDEPENDENCE OF CYBERSPACE By John Perry Barlow

[美] 约翰·P. 巴洛
John Perry Barlow

李旭、李小武译高鸿钧校

工业世界的政府们，你们这些令人生厌的铁血巨人们，我来自网络世界——一个崭新的心灵家园。作为未来的代言人，我代表未来，要求过去的你们别管我们。在我们这里，你们并不受欢迎。在我们聚集的地方，你们没有主权。

我们没有选举产生的政府，也不可能有这样的政府。所以，我们并无多于自由的权威对你发话。我们宣布，我们正在建造的全球社会空间，将自然独立于你们试图强加给我们的专制。你们没有道德上的权力来统治我们，你们也没有任何强制措施令我们有真正的理由感到恐惧。

政府的正当权力来自被统治者的同意。你们既没有征求我们的同意，也没有得到我们的同意。我们不会邀请你们。你们不了解我们，也不了解我们的世界。网络世界并不处于你们的领地之内。不要把它想成一个公共建设项目，认为你们可以建造它。你们不能！它是一个自然之举，于我们集体的行动中成长。

你们没有参加我们的大型聚会对话，也没有在我们的市场中创造财富。你们不了解我们的文化和我们的伦理，或我们的不成文的“法典”（编码），与你们的任何强制性法律相比，它们能够使得我们的社会更加有序。

你们宣称我们这里有些问题需要你们解决。你们用这样借口来侵犯我们的世界。你们所宣称的许多问题并不存在。哪里确有冲突，哪里有不法行为，我们会发现它们，并以我们自己的方式来解决。我们正在达成我们自己的社会契约。这样的管理将依照我们的世界——而不是你们的世界——的情境而形成。我们的世界与你们的世界截然不同。

网络世界由信息传输、关系互动和思想本身组成，排列而成我们通讯网络中的一个驻波（驻波：物理学概念，指原地振荡而不向前传播的运动状态——译者注）。我们的世界既无所不在，又虚无飘渺，但它绝不是实体所存的世界。

我们正在创造一个世界：在那里，所有的人都可加入，不存在因种族、经济实力、武力或出生地点生产的特权或偏见。

我们正在创造一个世界，在那里，任何人，在任何地方，都可以表达他们的信仰而不用害怕被强迫保持沉默或顺从，不论这种信仰是多么的奇特。

你们关于财产、表达、身份、迁徙的法律概念及其情境对我们均不适用。所有的这些概念都基于物质实体，而我们这里并不存在物质实体。

我们的成员没有躯体，因此，与你们不同，我们不能通过物质强制来获得秩序。我们相信，我们的治理将生成于伦理、开明的利己以及共同福利。我们的成员可能分布各地，跨越你们的不同司法管辖区域。我们内部的文化世界所共同认可的惟一法律就是“黄金规则”。我们希望能够在此基础上构建我们独特的解决办法。但是我们决不接受你们试图强加给我们的解决办法。

在美国，你们现在已经炮制了一部法律，名曰《电信改革法》。它违背了你们自己的宪法，也玷污了杰佛逊、华盛顿、密尔、麦迪逊、德·托克维尔和布兰代斯的梦想。这些梦想现在一定会在我们这里重获新生。

你们惧怕你们自己的产儿，因为在他们是本地人的世界里，你们永远是移民。因为你们惧怕他们，你们把自己为人父母的责任托付给了你们的官僚机构，而你们自己如此胆怯，不敢直接面对他们。在我们的世界，所有人性的情感与表达，无论是低贱的卑微还是高贵的纯洁的，都是一个不可分割的整体即全球范围的传送对话的组成部分。我们无法将翅膀借以拍击的空气与产生阻力的空气分离开来。

在中国、德国、法国、俄罗斯、新加坡、意大利以及美国，你们正试图通过建立网络边境哨卡来阻止自由主义的病毒。这在短期内或许可以防止传染，但对一个很快就被传送媒体所覆盖的世界而言，这将不再有效。

在美国和其他地方，你们日渐衰落的信息工业靠着推行那些在全世界鼓噪的法律而苟延残喘。那些法律竟宣称思想是另一种工业产品，并不比生铁更高贵。而在我们的世界里，人类思想所创造的一切都毫无限制且毫无成本地复制和传播。思想的全球传播不再依赖你们的工厂来实现。

那些热爱自由和主张自决的前辈们曾经反对外来的权威，与日俱增的敌视和殖民政策使我们成为他们的同道。我们必须声明，我们虚拟的自我并不受你们主权的干涉，虽然我们仍然允许你们统治我们的肉体。我们将跨越星球而传播，故无人能够禁锢我们的思想。

我们将在网络中创造一种心灵的文明。但愿她将比你们的政府此前所创造的世界更加人道和公正。

瑞士达沃斯
1996年2月8日

A DECLARATION OF THE INDEPENDENCE OF CYBERSPACE
By John Perry Barlow

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