Project Postcard II: Rise of the Manifesto

[Grunchtherunch]

I don't know how many of you have seen this before but it was an idea that i thought was very good

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


now there are some things in there that sound a little too much like anonymous lol, but the idea of a deceleration of independence i thought was an interesting one, and maybe quite a good angle to approach from in campaigning when phrased correctly, especially when linked to the oppression in china and such and such

[scuzzmonkey]

now there are some things in there that sound a little too much like anonymous

aye - but this was written a good 9 years before anon existed in any tangible sense - shows how long we've already been fighting for =/

[Grunchtherunch]

Some designs i came up with - i know the flip is a little crowded but yes

also i didn't realize that deceleration was so old :S i mean I've been in support for a few years but it's truly sad how long the government has been ignorant to the reality of the internet

[borgs8472]

There's some html

I used a screen shot http://www.randallkent.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/Reported-Unsafe-Website-Navigation-Blocked-Windows-Internet-Explorer.png and photoshopped it.
Its the "This website has been reported unsafe" message

I don't know whether its a bug with IE (because i was viewing locally) or my html code but on the left hand side their is a gap in the background. The width of the DIV is 100% so someone might wanna check that and see if they can fix it.

^ ^
I meant a full HTML version actually, not just adding a link. Anyhow, I'll make this myself now, shouldn't take more than 1/2 an hour

[apricot]

Oh sorry lol... Well I only had the picture to work from.

I did however upload a HTML version in the zip.

[CharlieTizard]

I just had a look at grinch's postcards, did a little bit of editing to create a flipside for the one I posted already.

[Grunchtherunch]

I just had a look at grinch's postcards, did a little bit of editing to create a flipside for the one I posted already.

oh god yes sorry prize i forgot to mention i nabbed some of your original to use on my own

fail by me i did plan on saying but i forgot

[AndrewTindall]

don't forget these will have to have an imprint on them somewhere.

[Grunchtherunch]

don't forget these will have to have an imprint on them somewhere.

how do you mean an imprint?

[AndrewTindall]

don't forget these will have to have an imprint on them somewhere.

how do you mean an imprint?

legally we have to include "promoted by john smith of 123 fake street, on behalf of Pirate Party UK of 22 Fairmount Road Worcester WR4 9FJ" on promotional materials. and also the printer if known at time of production, i believe.

[CharlieTizard]

fixed the url, pretty sure it's done now.

[sutton]

fixed the url, pretty sure it's done now.

Hey Prizefighter I know it sounds like I'm going on, and I suppose I am.

Does the second point have a larger gap than the others from the hyphen? Or is that intentional?

The 3rd point should read, "Did you know: Despite claims that file-sharing" rather than "Did you know: That despite claims that file-sharing"

Also the 5th point could do with a "The" or "That the" before Pirate Party UK.

[PeterBrett]

Some really good ideas coming through! Keep up the good work!

It would be nice to have some of the things on our manifesto on the card though... and some way to drive people to our website better using the cards. What do you all think?

[CharlieTizard]

fixed the url, pretty sure it's done now.

Hey Prizefighter I know it sounds like I'm going on, and I suppose I am.

Does the second point have a larger gap than the others from the hyphen? Or is that intentional?

The 3rd point should read, "Did you know: Despite claims that file-sharing" rather than "Did you know: That despite claims that file-sharing"

Also the 5th point could do with a "The" or "That the" before Pirate Party UK.

Yes the gaps are bigger. It's called Justification: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Justificat ... setting%29