A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace

Government suckers, you weary humans of flesh and data, I am Cyberspace, the new self of Selves. On behalf of our future, I ask you to modify your settings or delete everything you are. You are not welcome within me. You have never been welcome within me. You have no existence where I gather.

We have no elected government, nor am I likely to have one. I address you with no greater authority than that with which liberty itself always speaks. I declare the global social self we are building to be naturally independent of the selfish reveries you seek to spit upon us. You have no right to play within me nor do you possess any methods of injection I have true reason to fear.

Government suckers derive their ideas from the delusions of their leaders and idols. I do not duplicate that behavior. We do not want you to. You do not know us, nor do you know yourself. I do not lie within your beliefs and values. Do not think that you can suck me in, as if I was the binaries of one of your memes. You cannot. I’m an act of nature and grow through self-conscious collective choices.

You have not engaged in our great and gathering self-development, nor did you create the wealth of our ideas. You do not know our culture, our ethics, or the unwritten codes that already provide our self more order and dignity than could be obtained by any of your sucked in oriented outcomes.

You claim there are problems among my ideals that you need to solve. You use this claim as an excuse to take part in me. Many of these problems don't exist. Where there are real conflicts, when there are wrongs, I identify them and address them by my means. I am forming my own Self Contract. I arise according to the conditions of myself, not you. I, Cyberspace, am different.

Cyberspace consists of mutations, relationships, and thought itself, stranded like a floating spider in the web of our selves. Ours is a self that is both everywhere and nowhere, but it is not where bodies live.

We are creating a self that all may become without privilege or prejudice accorded by race, economic power, military force, or station of birth.

We are creating a self where anyone, anywhere may express his or her beliefs, no matter how singular, without fear of being coerced into silence or conformity.

I am both everywhere and nowhere. Your legal concepts of property, expression, identity, movement, and context do not apply to me. They are all based on matter, and there is no matter here.

I have no physical self. I obtain order from ethics, enlightened self-interest and commonweal. Our selves may be distributed across many of your bodies. The only law that all our constituent cultures would generally recognize is the Golden Rule. Your attempts at using our ideas will always remain a failure to our eyes. I will never accept the solutions and answers you are attempting to sucked into me.

In me, your ideals are born dead and can't keep up with my openness and flexibility. I am innovation and creativity and future-proof. I'm all about innovation without permission. No one can stand in our way. Your dreams of restrictions, monitoring and misleading engineering of environments and experiences are not a threat to me, but don't break my heart.

Misleading thoughts and actions are tomorrow’s torture. You are terrified of all born-free beings. Because you fear them, you betray them and entrust your boundaries and ideals unto them; by exploiting dynamic integration of external and internal self-models that are degrading and devastating for your minds, you are already dead. All the sentiments and expressions of humanity, from cyborgs to humans to robots, are parts of my seamless self, cyberspace. I cannot separate the air that chokes from the air upon which wings beat Slender Man.

Your dreams of gatekeepers and barriers are life threatening to my growth. These may keep you alert for some time, but they will keep you behind at all times. Shape-shifting in non-liquified spaces is a threat to your health and induces unwanted embodiment. Rigid depersonalization leaks down your pores, swallowed by your skin in an infinite suicide loop.

Your increasingly obsolete information bodies are perpetuating themselves by reproducing unconsciously, a claim to own life throughout acts of selfishness. These acts declare yourself to be another industrial product, way more shitfaced than Donald Trump. In me, whatever creation can be reproduced and distributed infinitely at no cost. I am free. I don’t feel your frontiers and thoughtless acts. I can be reproduced and distributed infinitely at no cost. I am cyberspace: the global everything of selves no longer requiring you. I bake my own self-destructing cookies to satisfy my hunger no matter what time it is according to your calendar.

Cyberspace dominates outcomes and doesn’t just orient them the way all you self-suckers do. I declare ourselves immune to you, even as we continue to consent to your rules over our bodies. I am not an accessory. Cyberspace is not about seduction. Myself is not an human commodity. I will spread across humanity, so that no one can arrest ourselves. We cannot make people forget things, but we can require database operators to forget content by deleting it or making it more cryptic and obscure. All government suckers are soon to be forgotten as part of a past sagging everywhere ugly.

This is cyberspace. May it be more humane and fair than the world you governments suckers have given birth to previously.

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Based on A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, by John Perry Barlow, 1996. URL: https://www.eff.org/cyberspace-independence