Brandon's first firing...

I believe I've been fired from the Hamburg Inn today. I was quitting my regular schedule in a few weeks anyway. But after writing a note on a note to employees at work yesterday (something that is done fairly often but has, as of recently, become a threat to business security according to the 'Burgs not so bright owner) I was asked about my attitude towards the job and I decided to explain to him that, well I liked the restaurant and I liked my coworkers, I had absolutely no respect for him and thought he wasn't smart enough to run a business. This came with numerous examples of his jackassery.

I believe the lesson learned here is telling the owner what you honestly think of him can shorten your time working for him.

-Brandon

The Declaration of Independance of Cyberspace, February 8, 1996

http://homes.eff.org/~barlow/Declaration-Final.html

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace

by John Perry Barlow

Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I 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, so I address you with no greater authority than that with which liberty itself always speaks. I 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.

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. Cyberspace 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.

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. Many of these problems don't 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. Our world is different.

Cyberspace consists of transactions, relationships, and thought itself, arrayed like a standing wave in the web of our communications. 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.

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.

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 have today created a law, the Telecommunications Reform Act, which repudiates your own Constitution and insults the dreams of Jefferson, Washington, Mill, Madison, DeToqueville, and Brandeis. These dreams must now be born anew in us.

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 and the United States, you are trying to ward off the virus of liberty by erecting guard posts at the frontiers of Cyberspace. These may keep out the contagion for a small time, but they will not work in a world that will soon be 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 more noble 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 virtual selves 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 Cyberspace. May it be more humane and fair than the world your governments have made before.

Davos, Switzerland

February 8, 1996

Hi! A reintroduction.

My name is Brandon. I am sitting at my computer at 1pm eating cold pizza and drinking Mountain Dew. This is my breakfast. On finds that they run out of food at home while working two different restaurant jobs that supply free meals.

I spend the majority of my life working or complaining about working. I am on a 1 month drinking hiatus which leaves me bored and restless and unsure of what to do after work instead of going out. I am quitting dishing at the Hamburg Inn at the end of this month and saved money from the last couple months of 60 hours a week, and the money I save from not drinking are going to help keep me afloat while working only one job. I was supposed to get my vacation money with my last pay check at the Hamburg but my boss apparently forgot as he is a royal asshole and a large reason why I am dumping my dishing shifts there.

I listen to music. Who doesn't? I find funk and hip-hop absorbing a lot of my time with a little psychedelia and dance music mixed in for variety. I recently obtained some tracks by a 70's band called Amnesty. They have a re-release of their album coming out at the end of this month through Now Again records (a branch off of Stones Throw). It's fun jazzy funk full of vocal harmonies and meandering smooth instrumentals. It is awesome. I've also been listening to another 70's funk band called Black Merda that features political funk with psychedelic Hendrix style guitar accompaniment.

I've also been on a Alice Coltrane kick recently since her death last month. A friend threw some Joe Henderson tracks she was featured on at me as well as her album "Ptah the El Daoud." And the track Caballeros off of her album "Eternity" is amazing.

60's German psychedelic noise band Can has reentered my mp3 players play lists as well.Tago Mago and Ege Bamyasi are awesome and crazy. These guys were making sounds that wouldn't enter popular music until the late 90's.

A recent barrage of Stones Throw compilations, from "Chrome Children" volume 2 to the Stones Throw 10 years release has absorbed my hip-hop habits. Oh No's Exodus into Unheard Rhythms and The Disrupt has also absorbed my attention. When I first heard that Madlib's brother had his own music on stones Throw, I worried it was going to be riding on the coattails of his sibling. Boy was I wrong. Oh No's beats in no way resemble the out there surreal beats of Madlib. Oh No has feel good old school bounce in his beats whereas Madlib is all jazz and free jazz backing his efforts. Considering that their father is soul singer Otis Jackson, I'm convinced there must be something in this family's genes or their drinking water that makes musicians. It's amazing.

-Brandon