by John Perry Barlow
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
中文译文:
赛博空间独立宣言
工业世界的政府们，你们这些令人厌烦的铁血巨人，我来自于赛博空间——新的精神(Mind)家园。以未来的名义，我要求过时的你们不再干预我们。你们在我们这里是不受欢迎的。在我们集聚的地方，你们不再享有主权。
我宣告，我们正在建立的全球性社会空间必然要独立于你们所寻求强加于我们身上的专制统治。你们既不享有治理我们的道义权力，也不拥有任何值得我们真正有理由害怕的强权手段。
政府的权力直接来自于被治理者的许可。你们既没有恳求我们的许可，也没有接到我们的许可。我们没有邀请你们。你们不了解我们，也不了解我们的世界。赛博空间不在你们的疆域之中。不要认为你们能够建造它，就像它是一个公共建设项目一样。你们不能够。它是自然行为的产物，它是在我们的集体行为中成长起来的。
你们不了解我们的文化、伦理或未成文的规范，而它们已经提供给我们社会的秩序，比你们用任何强制手段所获得的秩序还要更多。
你们假定，在我们中间存在着你们需要解决的问题。你们以这一宣称为藉口来触犯我们的领域。其实，这些问题中的大多数并不存在。即使真的有冲突，真的有出了错的地方，我们自己就能识别它们，并用我们自己的方法加以解决。我们正在形成我们自己的社会契约。这种治理是依据我们的而不是你们的世界的状况发展起来的。我们的世界是不同的。
赛博空间由相互作用、联系和思想本身所构成，——它们象驻波(standing wave)一样陈列在我们通信网络中。我们的世界是一个既无所不在也无所在的世界，但决不是我们的肉体所生存的世界。
我们正在创造一个每一个人都能进入的，没有由种族、经济权力、军事权力或出身带来特权与傲慢的世界。
我们正在创造一个每一个人不论在什么地方都能表达他或她的不管是多么单一的信仰的世界。
你们有关财产、表达、身份、运动、背景的法律概念并不适用于我们。它们是基于物质的，但这里却没有物质。
我们的身份没有肉体，因此，不像你们，我们不能通过物理的强迫获得秩序。我们相信，我们的治理将在伦理学、启蒙的自我利益和大众利益之中孕育成形。我们的身分可能已经超越你们大部分的法学。我们的全部文化所意识到的唯一法则就是金箴(Golden Rule)。我们希望我们能够在这一基础上建立我们特定的解决方法。但我们不能够接收你们正在试图强加给我们的解决方法。
在美国，你们今天已经创造了一个法律，电讯改革法，这一法律与你们自己的宪法相矛盾，并且凌辱了Jefferson,Washington,Mill,Madison,DeToqueville，和Brandeis的梦想。但这些梦想正在我们中间重新产生。
在中国、德国、法国、俄罗斯、法国、新加坡、意大利和美国，你们正试图在赛博空间的疆域上建立警岗来挡住自由的病毒。但是，这些只可能阻止一时的蔓延，在一个很快就会被比特媒体所覆盖的世界上，它们将不起什么作用。
我们将在赛博空间中创造一种新的精神文明。它会比你们这些政府们做的更加仁慈和公平。
文章来源:http://www.cyberpunk.cn/n160c5.aspx
由 窦荣军 发表于 2005年07月01日 10:35
这个论坛能让我了解教育技术学的动向
Posted by: 张世辉 发表于 2005年07月11日 11:05