https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/02/john-perry-barlow-internet-pioneer-1947-2018
John Perry Barlow was one of my favorite humans, though we never got a chance to meet.
Among his many achievements, he founded the Electronic Frontier Foundation (donate here), an organization I am proud to support at every opportunity.
He also wrote the following in 1996. I am reproducing it here, in full, so that it may be permanently memorialized in the Steem blockchain, which I assume he would find appropriate.
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
This is sad :(
Thank you for sharing his story
Rest in peace John Perry. Your legacy will stay with us.
this is very sad too
This is sad news. It hurts and pinches everytime someone dear to us leaves us. May he shine on his way.
Vote and resteemit done..Dear i always see your post
Love it thanks. Toqueville Yes! Thanks for connecting! Following YOU!
That is an amazing piece of work and left me with many things to think about. I appreciate having read this today. I am immediately curious about John Perry Barlow.
Sometimes one document can open an entire train of thought.
We need to see more of this @sneak roaming around the platform, looking at the bad as you do, but also bowing to find the small good that is being done towards the construction of a strong user base that re-invest in the platform.
Seriously man, change is not only smashing the bad... Is also promoting the great!
You code this thing, it is part your baby.
Hear what the base has to say and the code away as you know howto do...
Respect man!
And sorry you did not have the chance to met him, RIP
Thanks to you i read it.
A visionary guy and he will be missed. Cyberspace is still the new frontier. We are the pioneers
I had no idea about this guy, the EFF is like my favorite thing, but I didn't know he founded it.
I had heard about this declaration maybe read it once, but reading it again it has grown more powerful with time. It could have been written yesterday.
I have started a privacy workshop that you may like. I ran across your account on other searches, and then again on the steemit inc page.
I intend to investigate steemit itself over the next week or so, asking questions about its true nature, intent and ownership. Some of the things I have found give me concern as the the long term potential of steemit as a free source of information, or if it is actually blockchain tech at all.
I would appreciate it if you would be available to answer some questions I have regarding the nature of the organization and the blockchain, and thrilled if you would take a look at my privacy workshop.
Thanks for this post, and for any consideration you might be able to spare.
That is very sad news indeed.
Just listened to a great talk by him on the Psychedelic Salon podcast. The host @lorenzohagerty, did actually get to meet him.
Thanks for the massive upvote on my smartass comment to bernie.
@sneak
Very good means a social worker too, if you can know which brother in which country?
That reminds me of the Matrix. Americans elected Trump. British voted for Brexit in 2016. The real world is ours. I love technology, but do we want a Wall-E future?
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STOPGood job sneak i was waiting to see a flag lol you know what post im talking about
Hi, I was doing a bit homework and wandering if you are a witness or want witness votes? I noticed you are doing something I find admirable and just want to know the above, if so I will vote for you, if you have no interest in being a witness then I will save the vote for someone else, maximum respect to you.
Thanks for sharing this tribute. I didn't know much about him. This is one of my favorite quotes:
I think Steemit is an excellent example of a civilization of the mind. Thanks for all you do for the platform! I noticed you in a video with Ned talking about Smart Media Tokens and other exciting things :)
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STOPIt was a great loss but your contribution is maintained and we hope to remind you
Your level lowered and you are now a Minnow!
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Your level lowered and you are now a Red Fish!
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IMHO - Downvoting on Steemit creates in some people a fear of being coerced into silence, or conformity. The reason being; is because they don't want to lose the fruits that their labor (or free speech) has merited them. That being said, many people, when you downvote them, will resort to self-censorship, or silence.
I never heard of John Perry Barlow before today, but after reading his manifesto, I'd like to learn allot more about him, and truly do hope that his rest, is a peaceful one.
greetings. .
your articles are very good
ohhh..!!No it's really bad new @sneak . thanks for sharing John Perry Barlow has died post.
Amazing bro
https://steemit.com/creative/@pinguart/miniature-yacht-from-wood
Please Vote My bro , Pleaseeee
Hi my friend please forgive me please remove downvote on my comment, thank you friend if you appreciate me @sneak