"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."
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Activists from the United StatesEssayists from the United StatesPoets from the United StatesBloggers from the United StatesInternet activists
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John Perry Barlow
John Perry Barlow (3 October 1947 – 7 February 2018) was an American poet, essayist, lyricist for the Grateful Dead, cattle rancher, cyberlibertarian political activist, and a founding member of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Freedom of the Press Foundation.
23 quotes on TrueQuotesView all quotes by John Perry Barlow →
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