“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.” ~ John Perry Barlow, 1996
Above is the original Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace by John Perry Barlow (a lyricist for the Grateful Dead, no less).
Suffice to say, the Internet as we know it has not lived up to these ideals. The Internet has become a highly centralised global machine: It is censored in China, governed by GDPR in the EU and monitored 24/7 by the NSA in the USA. It is hardly a civilised space either. Netizens of the world have used the internet as an echo chamber to reinforce their worst ideas and basest desires on social media platforms, day web forums and click-hungry blogs.
The much newer blockchain technology, the backbone of Bitcoin, promised to reawaken the altruistic, libertarian ideals of a decentralised (even fully distributed, depending on who you ask), government-free, user-directed, peer to peer, private, democratic international network that promised to distribute all kinds of information and usher in a new wave of game-changing applications. It was supposed to disrupt the few remaining hierarchies (particularity finance and governance) the Internet had not got around to disrupting yet.
However, according to many industry insiders, the original Bitcoin blockchain is already morphing away from them distributed network of libertarian ideas and into a hierarchy, dictated to by the most powerful (mostly Chinese) mining pools that dominate the industry. The top four mining companies control 53% of Bitcoin mining capacity.
Yes, I am aware that even if mining (i.e voting and veto rights) are centralised, the information in the various blockchain networks that have evolved since Satoshi Nakamoto’s’ game-changing white paper back in 2009, is still, technically distributed since everyone willing to invest the time, processing power and cash cost involved in running a full node can do so. My point here is to focus on the centralisation of POWER, a trend that goes well beyond the crypto community, all the way up to the globalists who run the various Western governments of the world.
The Bitcoin blockchain project was supposed to be different. It was supposed to be about cutting out the middle men, cutting out centralised government power altogether, and putting the little man back in charge of his own money, privacy and identity. Instead, the crypto Mafia are building a highly centralised, highly unequal (in terms of both power and monetary value) hierarchy.
Not only that, blockchains and the ICOs that love them are getting regulated, by real world governments, at a rapid, pace. (This was inevitable. Any industry that does not regulate itself even when, for example, South African “investors” managed to get themselves swindled out of over a billion rand in the BTC Global crypto scam, is practically begging for big brother to step in and regulate it for them.)
In short, it appears that a decentralised, global network remains a utopian pipe dream for the time being,
One thought on “Blockchain and the civilisation of the mind”