“A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace”, John Perry Barlow, 1996
中文版#
本文翻譯轉載自： 约翰·P. 巴洛：网络/赛博空间独立宣言 - 智识@IdeoBook™
原譯者：李旭、李小武
原校對者：高鸿钧
工業世界的政府們，你們這些令人生厭的鐵血巨人們，我來自網路世界 ── 一個嶄新的心靈家園。 身為未來的代言人，我代表未來，要求過去的你們別管我們。 在我們這裡，你們並不受歡迎。 在我們聚集的地方，你們沒有主權。
我們沒有選舉產生的政府，也不可能有這樣的政府。 所以，我們並無多餘自由的權威對你發話。 我們宣布，我們正在建造的全球社會空間，將自然獨立於你們試圖強加給我們的專制。 你們沒有道德上的權力來統治我們，你們也沒有任何強制措施令我們有真正的理由感到恐懼。
政府的正當權力來自於被統治者的同意。 你們既沒有徵求我們的同意，也沒有得到我們的同意。 我們不會邀請你們。 你們不了解我們，也不了解我們的世界。 網路世界並非處於你們的領地之內。 不要把它想成一個公共建設項目，認為你們可以建造它。 你們不能！ 它是一個自然之舉，於我們集體的行動中成長。
你們沒有參加我們的大型聚會對話，也沒有在我們的市場中創造財富。 你們不了解我們的文化和我們的倫理，或我們的不成文的「法典」（編碼），與你們的任何強制性法律相比，它們能夠使得我們的社會更加有序。
你們宣稱我們這裡有些問題需要你們解決。 你們用這樣藉口來侵犯我們的世界。 你們所宣稱的許多問題並不存在。 哪裡有衝突，哪裡有不法行為，我們會發現它們，並以我們自己的方式來解決。 我們正在達成我們自己的社會契約。 這樣的管理將依照我們的世界──而不是你們的世界──的情境而形成。 我們的世界與你們的世界截然不同。
網路世界由訊息傳遞、關係互動和思想本身組成，排列而成我們通訊網路中的一個駐波。我們的世界既無所不在，又虛無飄渺，但它絕不是實體所存的世界。
我們正在創造一個世界：在那裡，所有的人都可加入，不存在因種族、經濟實力、武力或出生地點所生產的特權或偏見。
我們正在創造一個世界，在那裡，任何人，在任何地方，都可以表達他們的信仰而不用害怕被強迫保持沉默或順從，不論這種信仰是多麼的奇特。
你們關於財產、表達、認同、遷徙的法律概念及其情境對我們均不適用。 所有的這些概念都基於物質實體，而我們這裡並不存在物質實體。
我們的成員沒有軀體，因此，與你們不同，我們不能透過物質強制來獲得秩序。 我們相信，我們的治理將生成於倫理、開明的利己以及共同福祉。 我們的會員可能分佈各地，跨越你們的不同司法管轄區域。 我們內部的文化世界所共同認可的惟一法律就是「黃金規則」。 我們希望能夠在此基礎上建立我們獨特的解決方案。 但是我們絕不接受你們試圖強加在我們身上的解決辦法。
在美國，你們現在已經炮製了一部法律，名曰《電信改革法》。 它違背了你們自己的憲法，也玷污了傑佛遜、華盛頓、密爾、麥迪遜、德·托克維爾和布蘭戴斯的夢想。 這些夢想現在一定會在我們這裡重獲新生。
你們懼怕你們自己的產兒，因為在他們是本地人的世界裡，你們永遠是移民。 因為你們懼怕他們，你們把自己為人父母的責任託付給了你們的官僚機構，而你們自己如此膽怯，不敢直接面對他們。 在我們的世界，所有人性的情感與表達，無論是低賤的卑微還是高貴的純潔的，都是一個不可分割的整體，即全球範圍的傳送對話的組成部分。 我們無法將翅膀藉以拍擊的空氣與產生阻力的空氣分開。
在中國、德國、法國、俄羅斯、新加坡、義大利以及美國，你們正試圖透過建立網路邊境哨卡來阻止自由主義的病毒。 這在短期內或許可以防止傳染，但對一個很快就被傳送媒體所覆蓋的世界而言，這將不再有效。
在美國和其他地方，你們日漸衰落的資訊工業靠著推行那些在全世界鼓譟的法律而苟延殘喘。 那些法律竟宣稱思想是另一種工業產品，並不比生鐵更高貴。 而在我們的世界裡，人類思想所創造的一切都毫無限制且毫無成本地複製和傳播。 思想的全球傳播不再依賴你們的工廠來實現。
那些熱愛自由和主張自決的前輩們曾經反對外來的權威，與日俱增的敵視和殖民政策使我們成為他們的同道。 我們必須聲明，我們虛擬的自我並不受你們主權的干涉，雖然我們仍然允許你們統治我們的肉體。 我們將跨越星球而傳播，故無人能禁錮我們的思想。
我們將在網路中創造一種心靈的文明。 但願她將比你們的政府先前所創造的世界更加人道和公正。
約翰·佩里·巴洛
瑞士 達佛斯
1996年2月8日
英文版#
擷取自：美國電子前哨基金會(EFF)官網 A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace
A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace
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