BETWEEN THOUGHT
AND ACTION

John Perry Barlow responded by e-mail to a couple of questions about his "Cyberspace Declaration of Independence"

Most Declarations of Independence -- and specifically the one we Americans are most familiar with -- tend to be followed by wars of revolution. Do you foresee such a future? What might it look like?

I think that every time society faces tectonic power shifts, such as those inherent in moving from an industrial economy to an information economy, blood gets spilled sooner or later. It probably will this time as well. But given the fact that we're also talking about a conflict between a mental region and a physical region, I can't imagine what a cyberspace revolution would look like.

It's an interesting question, or complex of questions, that I don't have any answers to yet.

You write of cyberspace as a "republic of Mind" with no basis in matter. On the other hand, cyberspace as it exists today does depend on physical and corporate underpinnings: phone lines, electric utilities, communications infrastructures. Though the nature of Internet connectivity resists interruption and routes around censorship, in many ways the Net remains vulnerable to and dependent on corporate and government entities for its physical existence. How do you square such realities with the vision of an "independent" cyberspace?

The human mind has a supporting infrastructure as well. Meat, bone, neurons. Wetware, squishyware...and some hardware, in the sense that the mind lives in culture and culture, these days, lives in the communications network.

I'm not talking about a fully independent cyberspace. There is always a continuity between mind and body, and the same continuity extends between the physical and virtual worlds. But there is also a separation between thought and action. Action is what the body does and over which physical authority may be enforced. Thought is what happens in cyberspace and I've never liked the notion of governments defining what can be thought.