Sunday, July 04, 2010

“Civilization of the Mind”

In its entirety, an essay by John Perry Barlow.  A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace

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

Via Bill St. Clair, who reminds us here, of this.

“The only true consent is unanimous consent. No majority, no matter how large, is enough to deny a single right to an unconsenting individual.”

Posted by John Venlet on 07/04 at 02:07 PM
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Subjects, to Citizens, to Something Even Greater

Claire Wolfe links to a Washington Post article titled Jefferson changed ‘subjects’ to ‘citizens’ in Declaration of Independence, wherein one can read this.

“Subjects.”

That’s what Thomas Jefferson first wrote in an early draft of the Declaration of Independence to describe the people of the 13 colonies.

But in a moment when history took a sharp turn, Jefferson sought quite methodically to expunge the word, to wipe it out of existence and write over it. Many words were crossed out and replaced in the draft, but only one was obliterated.

Over the smudge, Jefferson then wrote the word “citizens.”

No longer subjects to the crown, the colonists became something different: a people whose allegiance was to one another, not to a faraway monarch. (bold by ed.)

Those words in bold, in the above quote, are the words I draw your attention to.  I do not think the writer of the piece, Marc Kaufman, is remotely aware of what those words in bold imply, nor are most Americans, now.  I state this because a good percentage of American individuals, today, have withdrawn their allegiance from one another, and instead have given their allegiance over to the United States government, which provides support to the thought that the Constitution was a counter-revolutionary act.

In the comment thread to Claire’s post, commenters are objecting to be labeled a citizen, and I completely understand why, because I also object to being labeled a citizen.  Claire responds to the objections with some additional reading on Jefferson, and ends her comment response this way.

I agree with Pat on the present state of things. If going from “subjects” to “citizens” was a huge philosophical change (and it was), then it’s time for another similar leap. Something to think about this Independence Day.

I wonder, too, whether articles about this (that are making major mainstream media rounds) might get a few people thinking. Most will probably just take it as a bit of historical trivia and move on. Ho hum. But what if a few thousand people who haven’t been coherently “political” hear about this say, “Hm … what have we become now? What are we to the government and what’s the government to us?” Could happen…

Indeed, “what have we become now?”  It is time for another huge philosophical leap, a full restoration of allegiance amongest individuals, and a casting off of the chains of government.  Let us obliterate American individuals’ servitude to the State.

Posted by John Venlet on 07/04 at 11:25 AM
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Independence Day

Today, is Independence Day, not, the 4th of July, though Independence Day does happen to fall on July 4.

While walking the critter early this morning, I passed only one other individual on the street, I said to them “Good Morning, and Happy Independence Day.”  In response, the individual said to me, “Oh, that’s right, it is Independence Day,” and continued on their way.  This cavalier attitude, to arguably the most important day in all of history and mankind, goes a long way towards explaining why you read the following in regards to Independence Day at History.com.

A Modern Holiday

With the rise of leisure, the Fourth also emerged as a major midsummer holiday. The prevalence of heavy drinking and the many injuries caused by setting off fireworks prompted reformers of the late 19th and the early 20th century to mount a Safe and Sane Fourth of July movement. During the later 20th century, although it remained a national holiday marked by parades, concerts of patriotic music and fireworks displays, Independence Day declined in importance as a venue for politics. It remains a potent symbol of national power and of specifically American qualities—even the freedom to stay at home and barbecue.

I hardly think that Independence Day remains “a potent symbol of national power and of specifically American qualitities,” unfortunately.

It seems appropriate, based on the above observation, that individuals should thoroughly re-familiarize themselves with The Declaration of Independence on Independence Day, particularly, in my opinion, this portion of the declaration, and, more specifically, the words which I have highlighted in bold.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, IT IS THEIR DUTY, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security. — Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.

Though many adult individuals may have a cavalier attitude towards Independence Day, and patriotism, some parents are still attempting to instill in their children a love of America, the “camouflage people” who make up America’s military, and the flag.

Sweet Daughter started drawing flag pictures around Memorial Day. We had done our best to explain how Memorial Day was to honor those people in uniform that keep us safe here in the United States. (We left out the part about honoring the ones that died. She’s four, and we figure five is old enough to introduce that buzzkill.) She remembered the “camouflage people” from our event at Petersburg in April, and she knows that there is evil in the world. In her case it takes the form of the Big, Bad Wolf in her dreams, but she understands that there are bad guys around and that special people exist to help keep her safe from them. Whether it’s a soldier, policeman or parent, some people step up when things go bad.

Go and read the rest of that story.  You may get a bit choked up, but in a good way.  Thanks to Tam for posting that the other day.

There are alot of American flags flying in my neighborhood, and I enjoy seeing them, because for myself the American flag represents Independence Day, not jinjoism or any of the other negatives which are at times associated with the flag.  In celebration of Independence Day, I retired my defiled American flag, and put up a new one.  Here it is, and Happy Independence Day.

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Posted by John Venlet on 07/04 at 07:47 AM
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