A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace | Electronic Frontier Foundation Skip to main content About Contact Press People Opportunities EFF 30th Anniversary Issues Free Speech Privacy Creativity and Innovation Transparency International Security Our Work Deeplinks Blog Press Releases Events Legal Cases Whitepapers Take Action Action Center Electronic Frontier Alliance Volunteer Tools Privacy Badger HTTPS Everywhere Surveillance Self-Defense Certbot Atlas of Surveillance Cover Your Tracks Crocodile Hunter Donate Donate to EFF Shop Other Ways to Give Membership FAQ Donate Donate to EFF Shop Other Ways to Give Search form Search Email updates on news, actions, and events in your area. Join EFF Lists Copyright (CC BY) Trademark Privacy Policy Thanks Electronic Frontier Foundation Donate EFF TURNS 30! LEARN MORE ABOUT US, AND HOW YOU CAN HELP. EFF TURNS 30! LEARN MORE. Electronic Frontier Foundation About Contact Press People Opportunities EFF 30th Anniversary Issues Free Speech Privacy Creativity and Innovation Transparency International Security Our Work Deeplinks Blog Press Releases Events Legal Cases Whitepapers Take Action Action Center Electronic Frontier Alliance Volunteer Tools Privacy Badger HTTPS Everywhere Surveillance Self-Defense Certbot Atlas of Surveillance Cover Your Tracks Crocodile Hunter Donate Donate to EFF Shop Other Ways to Give Membership FAQ Donate Donate to EFF Shop Other Ways to Give Search form Search A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace PAGE John Perry Barlow Library A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace Decrypting the Puzzle Palace A Not Terribly Brief History of the Electronic Frontier Foundation A Plain Text on Crypto Policy A Pretty Bad Problem Across the Electronic Frontier Barlow in Rockspace Barlow, Denning on the Clipper Chip scheme Being in Nothingness Complete ACM Columns Collection Crime and Puzzlement Cynthia Horner's Eulogy Go Placidly Amidst the Noise and Haste Is There a There in Cyberspace? J. Kreilsberg-Barlow interview Jack In, Young Pioneer! Jackboots on the Infobahn: Clipping the Wings of Freedom Just Say Yes Leaving the Physical World Mitch Kapor & John Barlow Interview Passing the Buck on Porn Selling Wine Without Bottles: The Economy of Mind on the Global Net Songs for the Dead Stopping the Information Railroad TV, LSD, and Life in the Country The Economy of Ideas (Wired Magazine) The Pursuit of Emptiness: Why Americans Have Never Been A Happy Bunch The View from the Brooklyn Bridge Thinking locally, acting globally Through Many Panes of Shattered Glass To Be At Liberty Verbum Magazine Interview Who Holds The Keys? 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 Back to top Follow EFF: twitter facebook instagram youtube flicker rss Contact General Legal Security Membership Press About Calendar Volunteer Victories History Internships Jobs Staff Diversity & Inclusion Issues Free Speech Privacy Creativity & Innovation Transparency International Security Updates Blog Press Releases Events Legal Cases Whitepapers EFFector Newsletter Press Press Contact Donate Join or Renew Membership Online One-Time Donation Online Shop Other Ways to Give Copyright (CC BY) Trademark Privacy Policy Thanks JavaScript license information