A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace

Barlow wrote this in Davos in February 1996, the night the Telecommunications Act was signed, and it became the founding manifesto of internet libertarianism. In four pages he declared that governments had no sovereignty over cyberspace, that the internet would create a civilization of the mind independent of the tyrannies of flesh, and that the old industrial world had nothing to offer the new digital one. The rhetoric is magnificent, the prophecy was wrong, and the document remains essential because it crystallized an ideology that shaped the design decisions of an entire generation of technologists. Read alongside Lessig and Zuboff, it becomes a primary source for understanding how the internet went from utopian promise to extraction economy. Free, as it always was.