A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace

By J. Barlow. Commonplace, 2021

1,074 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Yesterday, that great invertebrate in the White House signed into the law the Telecom “Reform” Act of 1996, while Tipper Gore took digital photographs of the proceedings to be included in a book called “24 Hours in Cyberspace.” I had also been asked to participate in the creation of this book by writing something appropriate to the moment. Given the atrocity that this legislation would seek to inflict on the Net, I decided it was as good a time as any to dump some tea in the virtual harbor. After all, the Telecom “Reform” Act, passed in the Senate with only 5 dissenting votes, makes it unlawful, and punishable by a $250,000 to say “shit” online. Or, for that matter, to say any of the other 7 dirty words prohibited in broadcast media. Or to discuss abortion openly. Or to talk about any bodily function in any but the most clinical terms. It attempts to place more restrictive constraints on the conversation in Cyberspace than presently exist in the Senate cafeteria, where I have dined and heard colorful indecencies spoken by United States senators on every occasion I did. This bill was enacted upon us by people who haven’t the slightest idea who we are or where our conversation is being conducted. It is, as my good friend and Wired Editor Louis Rossetto put it, as though “the illiterate could tell you what to read.” Well, fuck them. Or, more to the point, let us now take our leave of them. They have declared war on Cyberspace. Let us show them how cunning, baffling, and powerful we can be in our own defense. I have written something (with characteristic grandiosity) that I hope will become one of many means to this end. If you find it useful, I hope you will pass it on as widely as possible. You can leave my name off it if you like, because I don’t care about the credit. I really don’t. But I do hope this cry will echo across Cyberspace, changing and growing and self-replicating, until it becomes a great shout equal to the idiocy they have just inflicted upon us. I give you... A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace

Subfields: Communication, Information Systems

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/f3ddc53f402298e1242476ec22ae1a74e2d7cfc8

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Citations in the corpus

Enigma: Decentralized Computation Platform with Guaranteed Privacy (2015, background): “The original narrative of the web is one of radical decentralization and freedom[3].”
Second Thoughts: Toward a Critique of the Digital Divide (2003, neutral): “For example, Shawn Steward (1997) used the expression to name interoperability problems between analog and digital cellphone networks.”
Digital sovereignty (2020, neutral): “Hence, in contrast to a world bound by territories and sovereign nations, the world invoked by cyber libertarianism requires the existence of cyber sovereignty , with cyberspace as a new and autonomous virtual realm that is independent of governmental interference (Barlow, 1996).”
The Proteus Effect (2009, background): “…our avatars come to influence our behaviors and interactions with others. early rhetoric in virtual worlds and identity often employed metaphors of liberation and fluidity (Barlow, 1996; Turkle, 1995), but more recent studies have shown just how porous and entangled virtual and physical worlds are.”
New Media: A Critical Introduction (2003, methodology): “: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997. Aarseth, Espen ‘Computer Game Studies Year One’, in Game Studies: The International Journal of Computer Game Research, vol. 1, no.1 (2001). Available online at http://gamestudies.”