A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace

• description: 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...
• source: url
• author: Electronic Frontier Foundation

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.
工业世界的政府们，你们这些疲惫的血肉和钢铁巨人，我来自网络空间，心灵的新家园。我代表未来，请求过去的你们不要打扰我们。我们不欢迎你。我们聚集的地方你没有主权。

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.
我们没有民选政府，也不太可能有一个政府，所以我对你们说话的权威没有比自由本身总是说话的权威更大。我宣布，我们正在建设的全球社会空间自然地独立于你们试图强加给我们的暴政。你们没有统治我们的道德权利，也没有任何我们真正有理由害怕的强制执行方法。

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.
政府的公正权力来自被统治者的同意。你既没有征求也没有收到我们的。我们没有邀请你。你不认识我们，也不了解我们的世界。网络空间不在你们的边界内。不要以为你可以建造它，就好像它是一个公共建设项目一样。你不能。这是一种自然行为，它通过我们的集体行动而成长。

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.
你们没有参与我们伟大的、聚集的对话，也没有创造我们市场的财富。你们不知道我们的文化、我们的道德或不成文的准则，这些准则已经为我们的社会提供了比你们强加的任何东西所能获得的更多的秩序。

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.
你声称我们中间有一些问题需要你解决。你以这一说法为借口入侵我们的辖区。其中许多问题并不存在。在真正存在冲突的地方，在存在错误的地方，我们将查明它们并用我们的手段解决它们。我们正在形成我们自己的社会契约。这种治理将根据我们世界的条件而不是你们的条件而产生。我们的世界不一样了。

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.
网络空间由交易、关系和思想本身组成，就像我们通信网络中的驻波一样排列。我们的世界既无处不在，又无处不在，但它不是身体居住的地方。

We are creating a world that all may enter without privilege or prejudice accorded by race, economic power, military force, or station of birth.
我们正在创造一个所有人都可以进入的世界，而不受种族、经济实力、军事力量或出生地的特权或偏见。

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.
我们正在创造一个世界，任何人、任何地方都可以表达他或她的信仰，无论多么单一，而不必担心被迫保持沉默或顺从。

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.
您关于财产、表达、身份、移动和背景的法律概念不适用于我们。它们都是基于物质的，这里没有物质。

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.
我们的身份没有身体，所以，与你不同，我们无法通过身体胁迫来获得秩序。我们相信，从道德、开明的自身利益和共同利益中，我们的治理将应运而生。我们的身份可能分布在您的许多司法管辖区。我们所有组成文化普遍承认的唯一法律是黄金法则。我们希望我们能够在此基础上构建我们特定的解决方案。但我们不能接受你们试图强加的解决方案。

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.
在美国，你们今天制定了一项法律，即《电信改革法案》，它否认了你们自己的宪法，侮辱了杰斐逊、华盛顿、米尔、麦迪逊、德托克维尔和布兰代斯的梦想。这些梦想现在必须在我们身上重新诞生。

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.
你害怕自己的孩子，因为他们是本地人，在这个世界上，你永远是移民。因为你害怕他们，所以你把父母的责任托付给你的官僚机构，你太懦弱了，无法面对自己。在我们的世界里，人类的所有情感和表达，从卑鄙到天使，都是一个无缝整体的一部分，即全球零碎的对话。我们无法将窒息的空气与翅膀拍打的空气分开。

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.
在中国、德国、法国、俄罗斯、新加坡、意大利和美国，你们正试图通过在网络空间的边界建立哨所来抵御自由的病毒。这些可能会在短时间内阻止传染，但在一个很快就会被含比特介质覆盖的世界中，它们将行不通。

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.
你们日益过时的信息产业将通过在美国和其他地方提出法律来延续自己，这些法律声称自己拥有全世界的言论。这些法律将宣布思想是另一种工业产品，不比生铁更高贵。在我们的世界里，无论人类思想创造什么，都可以免费无限复制和分发。思想的全球传达不再需要您的工厂来完成。

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.
这些日益敌对和殖民主义的措施使我们处于与那些以前热爱自由和自决的人相同的境地，他们不得不拒绝遥远的、不知情的势力的权威。我们必须宣布我们的虚拟自我不受您的主权约束，即使我们继续同意您对我们身体的统治。我们将把自己分散到整个星球上，这样就没有人可以阻止我们的想法。

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.
我们将在网络空间中创造心灵文明。愿它比你们政府以前创造的世界更人道、更公平。

Davos, Switzerland 瑞士达沃斯
February 8, 1996 1996 年 2 月 8 日