A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace

What Hacker News says

1. andyjohnson0Aug 2026
   > "So, to the degree that we can locate an origin point for the promise that better computer technology would make for better democracies, I think the moment you would first look to would be January 1984, that Super Bowl ad that Apple ran for the release of the Macintosh, with the the sort of George Orwell, 1984 [theme]."

   With the greatest respect to Ms. Lepore's scholarship, I would suggest that that ad is too pop-culture and too early for our current Valley overlords. Instead I'd suggest John Perry Barlow's Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace [1] from 1996:

   "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."

   ...and on and on it goes. Some kind of strange Davos fever dream from thirty years ago.

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2. jdkeeSep 2021
   Hypernormalisation has a wonderful bit that quotes John Perry Barlow and his Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace. It is a fantastic juxtaposition with the role of information technology as a means of social control. I use this in my Cybercrime course.
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3. yuemaApr 2020
   Thanks!

   I was really inspired by John Barlow's "A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace" so I wanted to build something that can reflect my understanding of his vision, an autonomous cyberspace. I've tried to build blockchain, DApp and App in the past two years, all failed because of technical challenges. I'm on the fourth try and we are now building a "Wechat + Twitter" website. It is now open sourced at: https://github.com/Rackar/dao-quasar

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4. dvtrnApr 2020
   I was really inspired by John Barlow's "A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace"

   Somehow despite my own digital-revolutionary tendencies (don't read too far into this, heh) I'd never come across this bit of writing before.

   Thank you!

   I think you'll really appreciate the IndieWeb's adoption of microformats to enable federation, a brilliant example of it in use to display a timeline-esque rendering of contributors can be found on their directory: http://indieweb.xyz.

   Instead of posting directly to the directory, you enable your website with certain HTML tags and upon publishing a new page or blog entry, it federates out via webmention and anyone who subscribes to the directory gets your content.

   In my opinion this is the social-media web we should have gotten.

   Edit: Also, about your app...I love the UI. I can't read much of what's on the page, but I'll run your readme through a translator to learn more. Good luck!

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5. sjs382Nov 2019
   Along similar lines, John Perry Barlow's "Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace" from 1996 is something I make a point to read often.

   https://www.eff.org/cyberspace-independence

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6. z1mm32m4nJun 2015
   I'm not sure that the general public could end up with something as eloquent and succinctly expressed as John Perry Barlow's A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace[1].

   [1]: https://projects.eff.org/~barlow/Declaration-Final.html

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