Redazione RHC : 5 July 2025 09:39
“Governments of the World, weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of the Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you, beings of the past, to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty over the places where we meet.”
Thus on February 8, 1996 began the document “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace“, on the applicability (or lack thereof) of Internet governance, in that rapidly growing historical period.
It has been more than 10 years since the publication of the famous essay “The Hacker Manifesto” or “The Conscience of a Hacker” written by Loyd Blankenship, published on January 8, 1986, in which some concepts are overlapping and still in vogue, even if seen from a different perspective.
The essay “Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace”, was commissioned by the pioneering project 24 Hours in Cyberspace (an event that brought together 1000 people, including the best photographers, editors, programmers and designers from around the world) to John Perry Barlow, founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
John was also the lyricist for the Californian psychedelic rock band Grateful Dead, as well as a pioneer of civil liberties of the Internet who wrote this essay in response to the enactment of the United States of America law called Telecommunications Act, proposed in 1996.
This was a sea change in telecommunications policy in the country since the 1930s. The law also included the Communications Decency Act, which aimed to regulate pornographic content on the Internet.
John Perry Barlow
To Barlow, this sounded like a clear attempt by the government to extend its control over the free lands of Cyberspace, where Washington “had no sovereignty.”
The independence of cyberspace was presented at the 1996 World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, where cyberspace (according to Barlow) was to be free from governments and industry, because the Internet is without borders, time, or space.
“Governments derive their power from the consent of their subjects. You have neither asked nor received our ours. We did not invite you. You do not know us and you do not know our world. Cyberspace is not within your borders.”
By decreeing that the Internet was not within the borders of any country, therefore, no laws were to be enforced by any government. By the time this paper was written, Barlow had already written extensively about the Internet and its social and legal phenomena.
The work for which he was best known previously was “The Economy of Ideas“, published in March 1994 in Wired magazine, which alluded to Thomas Jefferson (Principal author of the United States Declaration of Independence) and some of the ideas he would write about in his declaration.
The Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace is a crucial text for understanding “the exceptionalism of the Internet”: a way of conceptualizing it as something intrinsically separate from reality, a distinct space built around rules and principles that cannot be applied elsewhere.
“We are creating a world where everyone everywhere can express their ideas, without prejudice because they are strange, without fear of being silenced or forced to conform.”
To express this new utopian vision, Barlow did not accidentally choose the metaphor of “Cyberspace,” a term invented by the science fiction author William Gibson.
Similarly, in the book “From Counterculture to Cyberculture” by historian Fred Turner, the nascent computational metaphor of the 1990s speaks of overthrowing bureaucracy and alienation and reconnecting with the ideal society of the free speech movement and “militancy countercultural” that originated on the University of California, Berkeley campus in the 1960s.
This vision, Turner writes, was “a world in which hierarchy and bureaucracy had been replaced by the collective pursuit of self-interest.” For these reasons, the Barlow Declaration holds a place in Internet history as a vision of particular idealistic, if mythological, positions.
“Your information industries, becoming obsolete, seek to perpetuate themselves by proposing laws, in America and elsewhere, that claim to own the right of speech in every part of the world. These laws declare that ideas are industrial products, less valuable than cast iron. In our world, all the creations of the human mind can be reproduced and distributed infinitely at zero cost. The global convenience of thought no longer needs your industries.”
Myths are deeply connected with technology and communication technologies. In particular, myths are stories that express what Vincent Mosco calls “the sublime,” which, like natural wonders, promote “a literal explosion of feeling that briefly overwhelms reason” only to be reclaimed later.
In fact, in 2004, John Perry Barlow, reflecting on the optimism of that bygone era, observed that “we all get older and smarter,” thus taking a step back from what he wrote at a time when the internet was immature compared to what it has become for humanity today.
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