Barlow writes the declaration of cyberspace independence at a Davos party, the night the CDA is signed

FEB 08 1996 · 12:00

Video: A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace Date: 1996-02-08 · Type: manifesto · Tags: john-perry-barlow, declaration, cyberspace, CDA, telecommunications-act, davos, 1996, EFF "Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel… leave us alone." Barlow wrote the declaration at a party at the World Economic Forum in Davos on the night the U.S. Telecommunications Act of 1996 was signed into law, Title V of which, the Communications Decency Act, criminalized 'indecent' online speech. He emailed it the same evening. Within three months an estimated 5,000 sites had mirrored it. The text is high cyber-libertarian Romanticism, and it was the crystallization of a political moment: the moment that the counter-cultural, anti-authoritarian energy around the early internet finally found its declarative form. Read in 1996 it scanned as bracing manifesto; read in 2026, after thirty years of platform capture, dragnet surveillance, and content moderation at algorithmic scale, it scans as a closing flourish, the moment the cypherpunk ethos was written down most clearly just as the conditions that produced it began to dissolve. The Telecommunications Act that provoked it accelerated telecom consolidation. The CDA was struck down by the Supreme Court in 1997, largely on the strength of the First Amendment arguments the EFF had been developing since 1990. But the structural transformation Barlow was trying to hold off, the enclosure of cyberspace by states and corporations, proceeded on a timetable the declaration could not interrupt. Barlow (1947–2018) had been a Wyoming cattle rancher, a Grateful Dead lyricist, and a founding member of the EFF. The declaration is the most widely read document any of them produced. Its closing line, 'May it be more humane and fair than the world your governments have made before', is the prayer that the rest of the Specter archive is quietly annotating. Facts • Written and emailed 8 February 1996, World Economic Forum, Davos, Switzerland • Provocation: U.S. Telecommunications Act / Communications Decency Act, signed into law the same day • Approximately 5,000 mirrors within three months of publication • CDA ultimately struck down by the Supreme Court in Reno v. ACLU (1997) • Barlow (1947–2018): Wyoming rancher, Grateful Dead lyricist, EFF co-founder Primary Documents • Full text, Electronic Frontier Foundation https://www.eff.org/cyberspace-independence • A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Declaration_of_the_Independence_of_Cyberspace