'Ello all. Here's a little snippet of John Perry Barlow's 'Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace' manifesto (which we'll be visiting briefly, in full, next week) to assist in appreciating dominant mental models of cyberspace.
A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace
"Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind….
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…
Your legal concepts of property, expression, identity, movement, andcontext do not apply to us. They are based on matter, There is no matter here… Our identities have no bodies, so, unlike you, we cannot obtain order by physical coercion….Our identities may be distributed across many of your jurisdictions…
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".
John Perry Barlow
Davos, Switzerland, February 8, 1996.
4 comments:
A Critique of Barlow’s “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace”
http://home.comcast.net/~reillyjones/critique.html
Nice read, Happy J. I have to say I agree with most of the critique in its air of pompous (and naive)utopian dream. It's central platform of the libertarian 'levelling' quality of cyberspace is rather optimistic & OTT; ill-considered and conceived and peppered with contradictions and fallacious reasoning / assumptions. I alway think it holds a 'nugget' of truth though...buried somewhere inside the political rhetoric.
Mmmmm!! Not quite sure how humane and fair our thoughts will be in a place where our identities have no bodies! Surely, just as humane and fair (or not) as they are in the world where we are now! And I'm not sure anyone could arrest my thoughts!!
I think it refers to censorship. It suggests to me that as we express and share thoughts/ ideas it is through others responses and questions that the thought becomes refined.
Attempts at censoring what people choose to express effectively arrests the development of the thought.
Post a Comment