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.