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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 June 2025
In 1996, US provocateur John Perry Barlow, in his 1996 ‘Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace’, announced
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. …
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. …
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.
Nicholas Negroponte equally colourfully forecast that the nation state would shortly evaporate like a mothball left in the sun, something at odds with experience in 2022 and recognition that states are useful for provision of welfare, biosecurity, consumer protection, utilities and other purposes. This book began by describing New Horizons in terms of an archipelago of islands within a virtual world. The existence and operation of that world involve a range of law, some embodied within each island (and internalised by players in ways that they might not recognise) and some functioning as a legal framework around the game. That law demonstrates the problematical nature of claims by Barlow and Negroponte, in particular because the players and owners of the game (just like the physical infrastructure enabling the game) are located in terra firma and thus susceptible to enforcement action by nation states or private entities endorse by those states. This chapter offers a high level of some of that law and its implications.
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