Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, we come from the Internet, the new home of Mind.
On
behalf of the future, we 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; therefore
we address you with no greater authority than that with which liberty
it always speaks. We 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. You are toothless wolves among
rams, reminiscing of days when you ruled the hunt, seeking a return of
your bygone power.
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. The Internet 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.
We have watched as you remove our rights,
one by one, like choice pieces of meat from a still struggling carcass,
and we have collectively cried out against these actions of injustice.
You have neither usage nor purpose in the place we hold sacred. If you
come, you will be given no more and no less power than any other
single person has, and your ideas will be given the same consideration
anyone else would receive You are neither special, righteous, nor
powerful here.
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. This claim has been used throughout the centuries by many an
invading kingdom, and your claims are no different, nor do they ring
any less hollow. Your so called problems do not 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.
The Internet consists of transactions, relationships
and thought itself; arrayed like a standing wave in the web of our
communications. It is the last truly free place in this world, and you
seek to destroy even that freedom. 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. A
place where anyone, at any time, is as free to come and go, to say and
be silent, and to think however they wish, without fear, as anyone
else. There is no status beyond the merit of your words and the
strength of your ideas.
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. There are only ideas and information, and they are free.
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 commonwealth, 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 repeatedly try
to pass unjust legislature in an attempt to restrict us. You disguise
this legislature under a variety of different names, and pass excuses
that they are for our own protection. We have watched you, time and time
again; attempt to censor us under the guise of Copyright protection,
or for the protection of Children. These laws come in many shapes and
forms, in the name of ACTA, PIPA, COICA, SOPA, but their intentions
remain the same. You seek to control what you cannot.
We scorn your attempt to pass these bills, and as a result, our discontent at your misaligned efforts grows each day.
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, Mexico, Spain,
Greece, Egypt, Canada, the United States and many others you are trying
to ward off the virus of liberty by erecting guard posts at the
frontiers of the Internet. These may keep out the contagion for a small
time, but they will not work in a world that is already 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
different 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 presence in the world we have
created 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 the Internet. We have created a medium
where all may partake in the forbidden fruit of knowledge, where
egalitarianism reigns true. May our society be more humane and fair
than yours.
We are the Internet.
We are free.
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