he online world has always equated itself with the frontier. In its self-generated and -propagated mythology, cyberspace is a brave new world, explored by pioneers, settled by homesteaders and marauded by the occasional outlaw. Like any fringe community, it does not take kindly to supervision from afar.
As Washington moved earlier this month to impose censorship on the world of computer-based communication, calls for protest and acts of resistance were the order of the day. But the "Communications Decency Act" -- which imposes stiff fines and prison sentences for transmission of "indecent" material online and which was challenged in court the moment it became law -- also aroused a new note from the world of the Net: a cry of secession.
Specifically, a "Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace" issued forth from the email-box of John Perry Barlow -- the sometime cattle rancher and Grateful Dead lyricist who co-founded the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an online civil liberties group. Conceived as Barlow's contribution to the "24 Hours in Cyberspace" project, the document circulated fast and wide on the Net.
Addressed to the "governments of the industrial world," it declares "the global social space we are building to be naturally independent of the tyrannies you seek to impose on us." A stirring, admittedly grandiose call to virtual arms, it's worth reading in full.
Barlow's declaration did not pop out of nowhere. The notion of the Internet as a quasi-sovereign entity has been kicked around ever since people realized that the structure of the network itself rendered it resistant to regulation or control by any individual state or central authority. Lately the rhetoric of Net nationalism has heated up. For instance, "Rules of
the Net," a sprightly and savvy new book about Internet culture by the late Thomas Mandel and Gerard Van der Leun, delivers a mock Declaration of Independence in its opening chapter. Theirs is different in tone from Barlow's, but similar in motivation: "On the Net, we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all users are created equal..." Like Barlow, who describes cyberspace as a "civilization of the mind," Mandel and Van der Leun call the online community "an information nation; a nation not located on the earth but in the mind."
This conceit is not only seductive, it is -- unlike so much of the hype that accompanies any use of the "cyber" prefix -- based on a substantially accurate reading of the facts. The Net is an unprecedentedly efficient connector of people on the level of ideas; it creates communities, based on shared interests, that transcend the mundane limits of time and geography. And so it has acquired a genuine, although metaphorical, sense of place for its habitues. Threaten that place with unwanted restrictions and the talk gets rebellious fast.
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