|
|
|||
Z I N E n new media |
a journal of new media experimental visual literary theory practice
|
|
1999 JAN 8
The TinkerNet
The TinkerNet
This is an open-ended work
The TinkerNet project involves (theoretically) an
infinite number of artist-
To connect here, send me an e-mail (clkpoet@ptd.net) with your
name, or some other identifier, and your work's URL. I'll add
this information to my link list. Your piece should include a
link back to mine and a provision for links forward to your
future partners' sites.
Additional information
ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/ David Knoebel, USA
TinkerNet
TinkerNet...
Declaration
This text from early in 1996 still carries an important
message for us all in 1999, and is so eloquently stated,
I just want to bring it to Zn readers...
A Declaration of the Independence 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 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 based on matter, 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-
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.
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-
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
John Perry Barlow,
|
|
RESOURCES |
|
|
|
|
|
TOP |
Copyright © 1997-99 Ted Warnell. All Rights Reserved |