Two years ago, I wrote a line-by-line retuation of John Perry Barlow's "A Declaration of Independence in Cyberspace" on my avatar's blog about Second Life. The post has a lot of time-specific Second Life events of that day, which included the appalling positions Electronic Frontier Foundation (which Barlow founded) took on the intellectual property rights of customers of virtual world platform providers.
Those issues might have seemed exotic at the time, but as with many things, Second Life was merely the incubator and the prototyper. Later, Facebook customers took up the issue of demanding ownership of their digital creations from that social networking platform; today Pinterest has been forced to revise its terms of service to acknowledge intellectual property rights of customers.
Since JPB has become very active again in pushing these ideas he has long promoted, spearingheading the anti-SOPA campaign, for example, I think it's good to re-publish my alternative manifesto that not only resists every one of JPB's technocommunist and technolibertarian notions that mitigate against real human rights, but proposes alternatives grounded in the real world.
You can read his Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace -- an infantile wail of a pampered cyber-pioneer in Davos (!) in 1996 -- who soon served as a spearhead for the rapacious interests of large corporations such as Google.
Let me revise the infamous "Declaration" of John Perry Barlow, to fashion it for the next stage of the Internet so that it might really serve real people, and not hippie ideologues in California who have made billions exploiting the willingness of people to work as serfs on their collective farms. Here you go:
Ideological Overlords of Cyberspace, you weary giants of pixels and bytes, I come from a virtual world, the new home of the Individual.
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. Your scripted machinima bots, your automatic data scrapers, your coded copybots have no place here: we ban them.
We *have* elected real-life governments, we will *go on having them*, and we will increasingly *turn to them* to fashion liberal, democratic and viable policies to regulate the space where we all have our being, so that it is not the exploitative and destructive space you have made it.
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 with both the formed collectivism of Creative Communism, the Free Culture of oppressive socialist social media, and the lawless corporate TOS regime that you tacitly aid and abet by never challenging it.
You have no moral right to rule us nor do you possess any methods of enforcement we have true reason to fear. Your calls to use code as a gun and ban critics from Twitter, or your chilling and violent speech on blogs, or the power of the venture capitalist to throw the media his way do not scare us, because when you wield those weapons, you discredit yourself.
Governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. Real-life governments don't disappear at the "electronic frontier" -- they are an integral part of it now in Gov 2.0 and other projects. You have neither solicited nor received our public input in policies of the Internet, whether open standards of IETF run by unaccountable geeks or other deliberately-obscured bodies of "Internet governance" that do not report transparently and openly to the public in a way that is clear. 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 individual actions and collaboration.
You have not engaged in our great and gathering conversation in virtual worlds and social media, nor did you create the wealth of our marketplaces in walled gardens and through APIs. You do not know our culture, our ethics, or the existing real-life codes that already provide our society that moved online as a natural continuation of organic socities to a cyberspace that we do not view as a transhuman and transnational space but a continuation of all human earthbound orders -- more order than could be obtained by any of your impositions -- even as we can witness the destruction of your lawless anarchy.
You claim there are problems among us that you need to solve like "lack of open standards" or "lack of hooks for apps" or "lack of fair use". You use these false claims 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 the real world, not your fake world of hippie cyberspace.
Our world is different.
Cyberspace consists of communications, transactions, interactivity, and expressed thought itself, arrayed like a standing wave in the web of our communications. Ours is a world that is both everywhere and nowhere, and is a natural and organic extension of where our bodies live and our handheld devices like mobile phones, i-pads, laptops and other devices.
We are creating a world that all may enter without privilege or prejudice accorded by race, economic power, military force, or station of birth, and most importantly, as full-fledged rights-bearing beings whether or not they are coders, and whether or not they possess the code used to interact in this space.
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 unlawful concepts of liberation of property, suppression of expression in the name of political correctness and your corporativist agenda, anonymity, interoperability, and corporate-owned context do not apply to us. They are all based on antequated hiearchical structures rooted in coerced collectives, and there is no collective here.
Our identities have bodies, so that crimes of cyberspace coercion like cyberbulling, content theft and invasion of privacy will be investigated and prosecuted by courts of law. We believe that from ethics, enlightened self-interest, and the commonweal, our governance will emerge, rooted in the best liberal democratic traditions of our real planet. Our identities may be distributed across many of your jurisdictions, but our citizenship in this case in the United States of America means that Cyberspace ultimately cannot trump our First Amendment, our property laws, and every other law of the land which has been fashioned and adjudicated by a free people with free elections. The law that all our constituent cultures generally recognize is the Golden Rule, which means that we do not fashion a double standard of collectivist coercion benefiting cyberlords such as Google and Twitter and Facebook and harming individual people and associations. 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.
We question your claims that the Telecommunications Reform Act in fact repudiates the Constitution or that new FCC polices on "net neutrality" could spell freedom and prosperity, and call for a broad and deep and free democratic discussion in every venue by every constituency and interested person in what real law should govern the domains where we now nearly exclusively live and move and have our being. The dreams of Jefferson, Washington, Mill, Madison, DeToqueville, and Brandeis did not include silencing critics on Twitter and kicking people in their virtual nuts on Typepad. 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. We live here. You don't. Because you fear us, you entrust your bureaucracies -- Google, Facebook, Twitter, Linden Lab and all the social media and virtual world corporations 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 emerging from organic life on our real planet, and integrated with life on that planet without artificial separation and abusive utopian beliefs of the lawless "electronic frontier". We cannot separate the air that chokes from the air upon which wings beat.
In China, Russia, Iran -- not in the United States (because telecom policy and the need to cover costs of scarce bandwidth is not a freedom, but a consumption problem) or Australia (because filtering out simulated child rape isn't suppression of free expression, but due diligence in avoiding the incitement of crime), governments are trying to silence citizens using social media. And you are trying to ward off the virus of liberty by erecting data scraper bots and proxy servers and anonymizers throughout 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 wielded by people in the real world truly empowered by them, and not diminished by them and doomed to live in a deracineated and oppressively transhuman Cyberspace.
Your increasingly obsolete Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 industries would perpetuate themselves by opposing laws, in America and elsewhere, that claim to control speech itself throughout the Metaverse via unconscionable TOS. These laws would declare code and coders to be a special product and class of people higher than others, although they are no more noble than pig iron. In our world, what the human mind creates and reproduced and distributed should be compensated if he wishes it, despite the misleading belief that there is "no cost" to distribute that in fact rests on costly servers and bandwidth. The global conveyance of thought no longer requires your forced collective farms to control it.
These increasingly hostile and collectivist 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 reaffirm your lack of rule over our bodies in Cyberspace. We will spread ourselves across the Planet so that no one can arrest our thoughts.
We will create a continuation of our planetary civilization of the human being in Cyberspace which is not artificially separate from it. May it be more humane and fair than the world your utopian pixel governments have made in the last 20 years that has destroyed civilization, destroyed the print and broadcast business and the public interest it serves, destroyed the music business and harmed millions of people through invasion of privacy, theft of identity, oppression of free speech, theft of content, and cyberbullying.
Prokofy Neva
Sutherland Dam
Second Life
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