Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. In 1996, with Congress hunkering down to defend national security, privacy, copyright and “decency”, all those obsolete guard-posts, he flung out in fury “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace”: But the wild, rowdy liberty of this place had to be protected.įrom 1990, when he co-founded the Electronic Frontier Foundation in response to Secret Service raids on games companies and the homes of hackers, digital rights became his life. Early settlers could well turn out to be sociopaths or outlaws.

There was nothing material here, and thus no property, intellectual or otherwise no context, no fixed identity. Here was a land that was unmapped, unregulated, crammed with unimaginable resources, up for grabs. He saw what other people had not yet seen, that this was a new space-one to which he quickly applied an existing term, cyberspace, and his own metaphor, the electronic frontier.

Macintosh roms. john perry barlow