JOHN PERRY BARLOW- The Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace- 2013

Presented to the WEF in Davos Switzerland Feb 8 1996 and read here on July 30, 2013 in New York City. This was recorded at the Q Department Studios, Department of Record.
John Perry Barlow (October 3, 1947 – February 7, 2018) was an American poet, essayist, cattle rancher, and cyberlibertarian political activist who had been associated with both the Democratic and Republican parties. He was also a lyricist for the Grateful Dead, a founding member of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Freedom of the Press Foundation, and an early fellow at Harvard University's Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society.
https://www.eff.org/cyberspace-independence
Electronic Frontier Alliance Principles
As a member organization of the EFA, we believe that technology should support the intellectual freedom at the heart of a democratic society. In the digital age, that entails advancing:
1. Free Expression
People should be able to speak their minds to whoever will listen.
2. Security
Technology should be trustworthy and answer to its users.
3. Privacy
Technology should allow private and anonymous speech, and allow users to set their own parameters about what to share with whom.
4. Creativity
Technology should promote progress by allowing people to build on the ideas, creations, and inventions of others.
5. Access to Knowledge
Curiosity should be rewarded, not stifled.
We uphold these principles by fighting for transparency and freedom in culture, code, and law.

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace
by John Perry Barlow (see full transcript on EFF.org above)

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.