Governments of the Industrial World, you boring giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. In the name 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.

Governments derive their powers from the consensus of the governed. You neither requested nor received ours. We didn't invite you. You don't know us, much less do you know our world. Cyberspace is not limited to its borders. Don't think that you can build it, as if it were a public construction project. You can not. It is an act of nature and grows through our collective actions.

You did not participate in our great and unifying conversation, nor did you create the wealth of our markets. You do not know our culture, our ethics, or the unwritten codes that already provide our society with more order than could be achieved through any of your impositions.

You claim that there are problems between us that you need to solve. You use this allegation as an excuse to invade our premises. Many of these problems do not exist. Where there are real conflicts, where there are errors, we will identify and resolve them by our own means. We are forming our own Social Contract. This way of governing will arise according to the conditions of our world, not yours. Our world is different.

Cyberspace consists of transactions, relationships and thoughts moving like waves rising in the network 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 everyone can enter without privileges or prejudices based on race, economic power, military strength or place of birth.

We are creating a world where anyone, anywhere can express their beliefs, no matter how unique, without fear of being coerced into silence or conformity.

Your legal concepts about property, expression, identity, movement and context do not apply to us. They are based on matter and there is no matter here.

Our identities do not have bodies, so unlike you, we cannot obtain order through physical coercion. We believe that our governance will emerge from ethics, enlightened self-interest and the common good. Our identities may be distributed across many of your jurisdictions. The only law that all of our constituent cultures generally recognize is the Golden Rule. We hope that we will be able to build our own solutions on this foundation. But we cannot accept the solutions you are trying to impose on us.

In the United States, you created a law, the Telecommunications Reform Act, that repudiates your own Constitution and insults the dreams of Jefferson, Washington, Mill, Madison, DeTocqueville and Brandeis. These dreams need to be born again within us now.

You are terrified of your own children, because they were born natives to a world where you will always be immigrants. Because you are afraid of them, you entrust your bureaucracies with parental responsibilities that you are too cowardly to confront yourself. In our world, all feelings and expressions of humanity, from the most degrading to the most angelic, are part of an integrated whole; the global conversation of bits. We cannot separate the air that suffocates from that in which the wings beat.

In China, the United States and Brazil, you are trying to repel the virus of freedom by erecting surveillance posts on the borders of Cyberspace. This may ward off contagion for a short time, but it won't work in a world that will soon be covered in bit-based media. Their increasingly obsolete information industries can perpetuate themselves by proposing laws, in America and elsewhere, that claim ownership over speech itself around the world. These laws may declare that ideas are yet another industrial product, no nobler than pig iron. In our world, anything the human mind creates can be infinitely reproduced and distributed at no cost. The global means of transportation of thought no longer requires its factories to be consummated.

These increasingly hostile and colonial measures place us in the same position as former lovers of freedom and self-determination who had to reject the authority of distant and uninformed powers. We must declare our virtual identities immune from its sovereignty, even as we continue to consent to its rules over our bodies. We will spread across the Planet so that no one can imprison our thoughts.

We will create the civilization of Mind in Cyberspace. It can be more humane and just than the world your governments have made before.

Davos, Switzerland

February 8, 1996