Things have been rather—rather—quiet on the Anonymous front since the loose band of hackers teamed with WikiLeaks to publish the Global Intelligence Files, obtained from the Stratfor hack. Now, Anonymous has issued “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace.”

While the declaration’s title fully communicates the message, the post-modern rhetoric must be read in its entirety to be fully appreciated.

One line in particular is especially interesting: “We declare the global social space we are building to be naturally independent of the tyrannies you seek to impose on us.”

It speaks to the absurdity of any government attempting to regulate something that is etheric; a creation beyond geography or product. Indeed, an entity that is something else entirely. Like the universe itself, the Internet exists before users log in and after users log off. It has its origins in and rides waves of electricity, but transmits data instead of charge.

It’s long been a cliche to say “information is power,” and it’s usually said in relation to governments and people, or by businesses hoping to best competitors. The cliche’s power, however, grows exponentially when viewed through the prism of the Internet, which has been at least as powerful as Johannes Gutenberg’s printing press, and doubly more dangerous to governments and business by virtue of its velocity.

The printing press can’t match the speed of the Internet’s distribution, and we’re just now entering an age of true internet publishing. Even so, the printing press will not be phased out, as we’ve seen with small, boutique publishers, and even larger publishing houses, who release instantly-collectible paper or multimedia experiences.

Whereas printing presses in centuries past could be destroyed, books intercepted, buried and burned; stores torched, libraries burnt to cinders, writers silenced by the state and the Church; internet transmission—with its uploads and downloads of written work, videos, music, the 0′s and 1′s—moves with unprecedented velocity. The aether cannot be destroyed and rendered as ash, only powered down. All the pockets of information can still be intercepted and blocked by the state or religious tyrannies, but once unleashed—if only through a small crack in the blockade—the ripple accelerates and spreads ever outward.

The good news is that the Internet is far too fast for traditional sovereignty to be superimposed on its boundless form. It is unique in all the world. Indeed, unique in the all the visible universe as far as we know. For this reason Anonymous and the hacker tradition is right in asserting that traditional notions of sovereignty are absurd.

As the declaration states:

Governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. You have neither solicited nor received ours. We did not invite you. You do not know us, nor do you know our world. The Internet does not lie within your borders. Do not think that you can build it, as though it were a public construction project. You cannot. It is an act of nature and it grows itself through our collective actions.

What Anonymous seems to avoid confronting, though, is that the Internet had its origins in ARPANET, a creation of DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (housed in the Department of Defense), in partnership with various universities. ARPANET was the predecessor to the Internet. While we may not want states governing the Internet ecosystem, in a very real sense the US government invited us in. This is the paradox, and might explain why a power structure would feel sovereign power over the Internet.

Anonymous might instead be suggesting that governments, most especially the US government, do not truly understand or “know” what its creation has become through evolution. This, however, is meaningless to governments. Anonymous argues, and quite rightly so, that the Internet has become something like a new plane of existence—a cyberspace, or a collective conscious. To that end, Anonymous writes, “Ours is a world that is both everywhere and nowhere, but it is not where bodies live.”

Governments, despite any suggestions to the contrary, understand this reality. They also know that they have sovereignty (we can argue whether this is by consent or not) over the individual, the nation, and it is here that they are attempting to legislate the Internet by proxy. Hence bills like SOPA, PIPA, H.R. 1981 and the international treaty ACTA that attempt to block what users can access and what ISPs can transmit.

The Anonymous Declaration states, “We are forming our own Social Contract.”  Nothing could ever be so important, necessary and revolutionary. Since the Internet has been built through hundreds of billions of thoughts, lines of code, and a variety of visions, it is only fair that it be held to a wholly new Social Contract, in the purest Jeffersonian sense.

Jefferson once stated that no generation should be bound to the laws of preceding generations. He wrote, “Every constitution then, and every law, naturally expires at the end of 19 years. If it be enforced longer, it is an act of force, and not of right.” The figure of 19 years was arrived at by Jefferson when considering the 18th century lifespan. What he meant is that as progress continues to unfold, laws and debts written on paper might well become outmoded or irrelevant to new generations.

Apply it to the current internet bills and we have our government—in fact, most governments—attempting to use archaic constitutional powers to govern a creation that would have seemed alchemical or magical, even science fictional, to Jefferson and the Founding Fathers.

Indeed, Jefferson would have found the following Anonymous excerpt full of great meaning:

We are creating a world that all may enter without privilege or prejudice accorded by race, economic power, military force, or station of birth. A place where anyone, at any time, is as free to come and go, to say and be silent, and to think however they wish, without fear, as anyone else. There is no status beyond the merit of your words and the strength of your ideas.

As if the Jeffersonian subtext could get any thicker, Anonymous drops this brilliant line: “These increasingly hostile and colonial measures place us in the same position as those previous lovers of freedom and self-determination who had to reject the authorities of distant, uninformed powers.”

Indeed, the attempt by governments to police the Internet is as absurd as monarchies governing from across oceans by proxy. Just as King George had to wait weeks for colonial intelligence to arrive at his throne, modern governments are likewise woefully behind a game of accelerating evolution of information. They are ill-equipped to govern this brave new world. And like King George in relation to his thirteen colonies, they will do anything to preserve power, or sovereignty, for power’s sake.

Read “A Declaration of the Independence for Cyberspace” below:

Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, we come from the Internet, the new home of Mind.

On behalf of the future, we 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; therefore we address you with no greater authority than that with which liberty it always speaks. We 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. You are toothless wolves among rams, reminiscing of days when you ruled the hunt, seeking a return of your bygone power.

Governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. You have neither solicited nor received ours. We did not invite you. You do not know us, nor do you know our world. The Internet does not lie within your borders. Do not think that you can build it, as though it were a public construction project. You cannot. It is an act of nature and it grows itself through our collective actions.

We have watched as you remove our rights, one by one, like choice pieces of meat from a still struggling carcass, and we have collectively cried out against these actions of injustice. You have neither usage nor purpose in the place we hold sacred. If you come, you will be given no more and no less power than any other single person has, and your ideas will be given the same consideration anyone else would receive You are neither special, righteous, nor powerful here.

You have not engaged in our great and gathering conversation, nor did you create the wealth of our marketplaces. You do not know our culture, our ethics, or the unwritten codes that already provide our society more order than could be obtained by any of your impositions.

You claim there are problems among us that you need to solve. You use this claim as an excuse to invade our precincts. This claim has been used throughout the centuries by many an invading kingdom, and your claims are no different, nor do they ring any less hollow. Your so called problems do not 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.

The Internet consists of transactions, relationships and thought itself; arrayed like a standing wave in the web of our communications. It is the last truly free place in this world, and you seek to destroy even that freedom. 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. A place where anyone, at any time, is as free to come and go, to say and be silent, and to think however they wish, without fear, as anyone else. There is no status beyond the merit of your words and the strength of your ideas.

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. There are only ideas and information, and they are free.

Our identities have no bodies, so, unlike you, we cannot obtain order by physical coercion. We believe that from ethics, enlightened self-interest, and the commonweal, our governance will emerge. Our identities may be distributed across many of your jurisdictions.

The only law that all our constituent cultures would generally recognize is the Golden Rule. We hope we will be able to build our particular solutions on that basis. But we cannot accept the solutions you are attempting to impose.

In the United States, you repeatedly try to pass unjust legislature in an attempt to restrict us. You disguise this legislature under a variety of different names, and pass excuses that they are for our own protection. We have watched you, time and time again; attempt to censor us under the guise of Copyright protection, or for the protection of Children. These laws come in many shapes and forms, in the name of ACTA, PIPA, COICA, SOPA, but their intentions remain the same. You seek to control what you cannot.

We scorn your attempt to pass these bills, and as a result, our discontent at your misaligned efforts grows each day.

You are terrified of your own children, since they are natives in a world where you will always be immigrants. Because you fear them, you entrust your bureaucracies with the parental responsibilities you are too cowardly to confront yourselves. In our world, all the sentiments and expressions of humanity, from the debasing to the angelic, are parts of a seamless whole, the global conversation of bits. We cannot separate the air that chokes from the air upon which wings beat.

In China, Germany, France, Russia, Singapore, Italy, Mexico, Spain, Greece, Egypt, Canada, the United States and many others you are trying to ward off the virus of liberty by erecting guard posts at the frontiers of the Internet. These may keep out the contagion for a small time, but they will not work in a world that is already blanketed in bit-bearing media.

Your increasingly obsolete information industries would perpetuate themselves by proposing laws, in America and elsewhere that claim to own speech itself throughout the world. These laws would declare ideas to be another industrial product, no different than pig iron.

In our world, whatever the human mind may create can be reproduced and distributed infinitely at no cost. The global conveyance of thought no longer requires your factories to accomplish.

These increasingly hostile and colonial measures place us in the same position as those previous lovers of freedom and self-determination who had to reject the authorities of distant, uninformed powers. We must declare our presence in the world we have created immune to your sovereignty, even as we continue to consent to your rule over our bodies. We will spread ourselves across the Planet so that no one can arrest our thoughts.

We will create a civilization of the Mind in the Internet. We have created a medium where all may partake in the forbidden fruit of knowledge, where egalitarianism reigns true. May our society be more humane and fair than yours.

We are the Internet.
We are free.