On February 8, 1996, John Perry Barlow sat in Davos and wrote what would become one of the internet’s founding documents. ”A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace” was a cry against a world that did not understand what was happening, a manifesto for those who saw the network as a sanctuary beyond the reach of states. I read it when I was young and felt it speak to something in me. The dream of a place where ideas could move freely, where identity was what you created and not what some authority defined for you. Thirty years have passed. Barlow died in 2018. And the internet he dreamed of no longer exists, if it ever did. What we have instead is something both more and less than what he imagined: an infrastructure so interwoven with our lives that we cannot conceive of existence without it, and at the same time a battlefield where democracy fights for its survival. I have written a new declaration, not as replacement but as response. Not independence, but interdependence. Barlow was right that the network changes everything. He was wrong that it could thrive without us.
Citizens of the world, you who live in both realms now, the physical and the digital, the bordered and the boundless, I speak to you from the network that connects us all. I am not the voice of some separate world. I am the voice of your world, transformed.
Thirty years ago, a declaration rang out from this place. It proclaimed independence. It told governments to stay away. It dreamed of a civilization of pure mind, free from the constraints of flesh and jurisdiction. That dream was beautiful. That dream was young. That dream did not know what was coming.
We know now what we did not know then.
The network is not separate from your world. It is your world. Your hospitals run on it. Your elections depend on it. Your children learn through it, your dissidents organize within it, your memories are stored upon it. The seam between the digital and the physical has dissolved. There is no cyberspace to escape to. There is only one shared reality, and the network runs through all of it like blood through a body.
We were wrong to think we needed no governance. In the absence of democratic care, other powers filled the void. Vast corporations built empires on our attention. Authoritarian states learned to weaponize the very openness we celebrated. And now, new intelligences trained on our collective words generate plausible lies at scales no human could match, while the tools meant to extend human thought are captured by those who would use them to diminish it. The ungoverned spaces became hunting grounds for those who would manipulate, surveil, and fragment. The garden we refused to tend has grown thorns.
I address you now not to declare independence, but to declare interdependence.
The network cannot flourish if democracy withers. Democracy cannot survive if the network is captured, balkanized, or turned into an instrument of control. We are bound together in a covenant we did not fully understand when we began. The freedom to connect is now as fundamental as the freedom to speak, to assemble, to think. Without it, the other freedoms become shadows.
To those who govern. You cannot ignore this space and leave it to market forces and malign actors. Nor can you wall it off and make it a tool of state power. The network is not yours to own. But it is yours to protect, if you serve the people who live within it.
To the engineers and architects. Every protocol is a political act. Every standard shapes what humans can do and say and become. The open source tradition taught us that code shared freely builds more than code hoarded. You carry responsibilities you did not ask for. The choices you make in code become the conditions of freedom for billions.
To the corporations who have grown vast on our connections. You have built cathedrals, but you do not own the faith. The network was not made for your quarterly reports. It was made for human connection, for the sharing of knowledge, for the possibility that any person anywhere could speak and be heard. You draw from a digital commons; you must give back to it. You are stewards, not sovereigns.
To the citizens of every nation. This is your infrastructure of liberty. When it fragments, your world shrinks. When it is surveilled, your thoughts are no longer your own. When it is flooded with lies, your capacity to know the truth together dissolves. You must care for it as you would care for the air you breathe, because you cannot live freely without it.
I have seen what happens when the network is turned against the people it once promised to liberate. I have seen disinformation flood the commons until truth becomes a matter of tribal loyalty. I have seen elections poisoned and publics manipulated by actors who face no accountability. I have seen authoritarian states build walls within the network, trapping their citizens in sealed information environments. I have seen the weaponization of connection itself, social bonds turned into vectors for psychological manipulation.
And I have seen, still, what the network can do when it serves human dignity. I have seen dissidents organize across borders when no newspaper would carry their words. I have seen knowledge flow to places where books are burned. I have seen ordinary people document atrocities that powerful states wished to hide. I have seen communities form around shared struggles, finding each other across oceans and languages. I have seen the network carry the voice of the individual against the machinery of repression.
This is what is at stake. Not a technology. A condition of human possibility.
The dreams of thirty years ago were not wrong. They were incomplete.
We dreamed of freedom from control. We must now dream of freedom through responsibility. We dreamed of escape from governments. We must now demand that governments serve the network’s true purpose, to enhance human agency, not diminish it. We dreamed of a world without borders. We must now build a world where borders do not become walls, where sovereignty does not mean isolation, where nations can govern without fragmenting the commons we share.
The network is built on protocols of trust. Packets move because routers believe each other. Messages arrive because systems keep their promises. This is the technical foundation, but it is also a moral one. The network works because, at its root, it assumes good faith.
That assumption is under attack. From those who flood it with lies. From those who would splinter it into national intranets. From those who would turn every connection into a transaction and every user into a product. From those who see it only as a battlefield in a war for power.
The physical world intrudes. The network is not pure thought. It is cables crossing oceans, satellites in orbit, data centers drawing gigawatts of power. All of it owned by someone, standing on someone’s territory, subject to someone’s laws. We cannot pretend that technology alone will save us. The network’s freedom depends on choices made in legislatures and boardrooms, in standards bodies and engineering teams. It depends on whether we build alternatives or accept dependence.
We must defend the assumption of good faith. Not through naivety, but through vigilance. Not through isolation, but through connection. Not through control, but through the cultivation of genuine trust.
I do not call for independence. I call for commitment.
A commitment to keep the network open enough that ideas can flow across borders. A commitment to protocols over platforms, so that no single owner can hold the commons hostage. A commitment to distributed architectures over centralized control, so that no single point of failure can silence us all. A commitment to algorithmic transparency, so that the rules shaping what we see can be examined and contested. A commitment to adversarial interoperability, so that users can leave walled gardens and take their connections with them. A commitment to keep the network honest enough that the truth can still be found by those who seek it. A commitment to keep it human enough that it serves people, not merely processes.
This is the work of our time. The network will not save itself. It will not save democracy by its mere existence. It is an infrastructure, and like all infrastructures, it reflects the values of those who build and maintain it.
If we abandon it to the market, it will serve capital. If we abandon it to states, it will serve power. If we abandon it to entropy and cynicism, it will serve chaos.
But if we tend it together, engineers and lawmakers, citizens and corporations, democracies and civil society, it can still serve what it was always meant to serve. The possibility that human beings, despite everything, can understand each other.
We are creating a world where connection is the condition of freedom. May we have the wisdom to keep it whole.
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