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

DJ Drama and Don Cannon arrested for making mixtapes

http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/01/19/technology/web.0119mixtapes.php
http://nahright.com/news/2007/01/16/dj-drama-and-don-cannon-arrested-for-piracy/
http://www.maximumfun.org/blog/2007/01/dj-drama-and-dj-cannon-arrested-in.html

And an official RIAA report last May says, "As part of its report, the RIAA for the first time has identified 12 "priority" cities as part of its nationwide physical goods piracy assessment. These cities – Atlanta, Austin, Chicago, Dallas, Houston, Los Angeles, Miami, New York, Philadelphia, Providence, San Diego, and San Francisco – are all "hot spots" of music theft, with significant piracy problems from the manufacturer level all the way down to the point of retail sale. The RIAA will step up law enforcement training and commit additional investigative resources in all of these cities in the coming year."

The RIAA is beginning it's crackdown on self promotion and any sort of examples or paths to musical success that don't require the Recording Industry's permission. And the government has agreed to give them the authoritative power to do so. The official claim is that they were selling counterfeit CD's. That it threatened the major label's ability to make a profit off of their artist's music. In reality Mixtapes are a good promotional tool and can increase sales. The fear here isn't that they will lose sales directly to mixtape sales. It is that DJ's with the ability to release mixtapes are a clear demonstration of why the Recording industry is obsolete and unnecessary. By cracking down on whatever unaffilliated artist and promoters of artists that they can. they hope to stem the tide of independant musicians who are finding ways to succeed without signing their work they put their heart and soul into, to a record company.

Regardless of whether you are a fan of hip-hop or DJ Drama and Don Cannon, this is an issue you should care about. There are going to be more arrests and each person arrested, each musician, music dealer, producer, DJ, promoter, or whoever else they arrest needs to be put in the limelight. Every person the Recording industry hurts needs to be a martyr figure in the eyes of the media. Everytime the RIAA makes a move like this, it needs to be turned into a press loss for them. The only way to stop this is to get the  masses to care.  Tell your friends, enemies, family, coworkers, and acquintances about this. Post it on your blogs, your Myspaces, your Facebooks. Plaster bulliten boards, Spray it in graffiti, write it on bathroom walls. Free DJ Drama and Don Cannon. Fuck the RIAA.

-Brandon

I'm back again... fuckers

Video card replaced, pc is running.

-Brandon

I'm back!

Internets are operating at maximum capacity.
Idle time wasting in progress.
Obtaining musics and entertainments at high speeds.
Subject now possesses 100% of happiness capacity.

-Brandon

Sadness...

Well my computer is completely fucked, and has been for about a week and a half now. So if I'm sent messages and I don't respond, I'm not slighting you, I just don't have anyway to read it at the moment.

-Brandon

For the few of you who don't know...

I have a myspace page now. Why? because I'm weak. http://www.myspace.com/tsgarp524. This is still my primart blog, but I tend to copy paste stuff to myspace as well.

-Brandon

Woo!

I have a second job! I start on monday! I'm now on my way to being slightly less poor! Woo!

-Brandon

Fuck Iowa/Iowa State Weekend

This is, hands down, the worst fucking weekend in Iowa City. Every jackass in iowa flocks to this town, and every jackass already here is working three times as hard to piss me off. I wish both teams had somehow lost so the none of the assholes would be happy.

-Brandon

The story

So, I got home from work today at 5ish, ate some food, watched some west wing, and then spent some time fucking around online. Something (I don't know what) started a train of thought that led to a cool idea for a short story. I have wanted for a while to attempt to write a comic, I just don't have the artistic skill to actually draw it. So I begin writing my ideas for the story. My story turned into 14 pages of scrawled notes about a fictional country including its government, demographics, architectural influences, geography, economics and social problems. My original story idea has turned into an introduction to a fake country that will leave me with the ablity to write all sorts of stories during all sorts of time periods. I'm gonna have some friends who know more about certain subjects look over some of this stuff and give their input over how intelligent they think it is, but if I can script out some actual dialogue and get a decent artist interested, I think this can go somewhere. Even if I don't do anything with it, its nice to be doing something productive, I haven't really worked toward creating anything since I've dropped out of school, this project is emotionally energizing.

-Brandon