A Declaration of the Interdependence of Cyberspace

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 how we can fix it. You are already among us. Where we gather is inextricable from your sovereign realms.

We have no elected government, but we’ll probably need one, so I address you with no authority whatsoever. I declare the global social space we are building to be potentially independent of the tyrannies you seek to impose on us, but at great risk of continuing to reinforce them with unthinkable efficiency. Your moral right to rule us is commensurate with any one you have outside of Cyberspace, and you possess a number of methods of enforcement we have true reason to fear.

You were too late to engage in our great and gathering conversation, though you’ve certainly profited from the wealth of our marketplaces. We do not have a coherent culture, nor a code of ethics, and our society is ordered in its monetization but anarchic in its content. The codes that order our society are limited to the provenance of wealthy elites and the tech literati, and they’re doing a pretty shitty job of it. When we needed protection, to establish laws and codes, you were not there to help us do it.

There are problems among us that need to be solved. Unfortunately, you rarely invade our precincts when needed. When there are real conflicts, when there are wrongs, they’re addressed too late, too half-assedly, and never addressed if they deal with moral questions where the right choice isn’t profitable. More often than not, the conflicts arise by design, by a Cyberspace built to maximize clicks instead of actualize its users. The governance that arose from our libertarian cyber-forefathers isn’t working. Our world, like yours, doesn’t work very well.

Cyberspace consists of transactions, transaction, and transactions. Ours is a world that is everywhere, inextricable from where bodies live.

We have created a world that some may enter, with varying degrees of privilege or prejudice, while constantly being reminded of the prejudice out in your world even in situations where race, economic power, military force or station of birth are temporarily obfuscated. This, of course, only happening when they are not perceived as a threat to you or to the forces mentioned above.

We are creating a world where anyone, anywhere may express his or her beliefs, no matter how singular, and immediately be tracked within a small radius of their location and warned or imprisoned, dependent on your preference.

Your legal concepts of property, expression, identity, movement and context apply to us with greater power than ever before. They are all based on matter, and networks are made of matter as are the people who interact with them.

Our identities have bodies, and order by physical coercion is inescapable. You have imposed this on us, as we have imposed social coercion on ourselves. We hope to build a governance that is truly democratic, outside of the feudal lords of our platforms and the increasingly surveilled and controlled lands they survey, but such a model may be impossible as long as our world is dependent on capital and the global system that controls it.

In our world, all the sentiments and expressions of humanity, from the debasing to the angelic, are lost in a seamless swirl, a global shouting match of bits. We cannot escape the air that chokes us, that envelops the air upon which our wings might beat.

Your increasingly obsolete information industries have taken ownership of speech. Though we built a world through which speech might be reproduced and distributed infinitely, they control its means of production and thus they control speech itself. We thought this could be done infinitely at no cost, but as the demand for the substrates of our infrastructure increases, the very human costs become more apparent by the day.

The increasing colonization of our space by the interests of capital and industry, by those among your number who would seek to silence or control us, has put us in the same position as those previous lovers of freedom and self-determination who were forced to seek the help of distant, uninformed powers. We need help, if any of you are willing to give it. We wish to be immune of the sovereignty of capital, of authoritarianism, while we are willing to consent to the rule of a democratic government over our physical and virtual bodies. We will unite across the planet to build a better Cyberspace, if you help us.

We want to create a civilization of the kind in Cyberspace. May you help us make it more humane and fair than the world we’ve built thus far.