Link: https://www.eff.org/cyberspace-independence

Full Text:

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

Currently the subscribed groups list is only shown in the sidebar of the index page, but given that the sidebar isn't currently used for much else and doesn't take up much vertical space, it would be nice to have the group list persisted across at least the individual groups if not threads themselves, to make navigation easier without having to go back to the top level to check a different group.

Dear Tildes community,

this is an issue that's bugged me for some time. I might struggle to put this into the right words initially, because I have not studied either philosophy, psychology, biology, sociology or anthropology. Yet, all of those fields could input into this. I will edit this post to clarify things once people start commenting.

I will begin by stating the question at the root of the issue I am trying to explore:

Does de-humanisation of others occur automatically, as soon as we believe that we can predict their actions?

Things to consider:

• What is a measure of 'humanity'? Is it consciousness? Self-awareness? Intelligence? Empathy?
• Is it true that a more 'conscious' or 'intelligent' creature is closer to us in nature and therefore should enjoy more rights, considerations, or respect? (Case in point: Some countries will not allow performing surgery on an octopus without anesthesia, due to them being considered very high up on the ladder of consciousness)
• It is easy to conflate consciousness and intelligence. I think that's a bit of a trap. I have often looked at intelligence as a sort of "clock rate" of the brain. As in, you might be able to process information very quickly, but that's still pointless if you're running the wrong algorithms, or have very little knowledge to rely on. Intelligence all by itself is not a good measure of how 'conscious' or 'aware' or 'human' something is. Often, however, people tend to call animals more intelligent or less intelligent when they mean 'more highly developed', or 'more conscious'. The same probably applies to people as well.
• Additionally, among self-aware, conscious beings (humans), empathy and intelligence van cary wildly. Therefore, does consciousness, or even 'human-ness' vary? Is a highly intelligent psychopath less human than a much less intelligent but empathetic person?
• What do we use to assess whether a human is highly developed, or less developed / desirable? (Brushing aside the notion that we obviously shouldn't do so). I think it is important to look at what mechanisms have been used in the past to demonise swathes of the population, in order to discredit them or further some kind of agenda. Take African people during the slave trade. They were called primitive, less intelligent, less human. In fact, in more subtle ways this even happens to women nowadays. They are constantly belittled by chauvinists, for supposedly being less intellectually capable due to their gender. Are these all forms of de-humanisation, linked predominantly to intellect?
• What is this founded upon? Is it predictability of their actions? Let's try to go full circle. How does one discredit a part of the population? One observes them and demonises their behaviours (and with that, culture, etc.) The predictability of such behaviours is essential in this. You cannot reliably say that "those brutes do [x], how disgusting", without there being frequent evidence of it actually happening. (On the flip-side, could people be predictably advanced or developed?)
• What do we think of predictable people in general? Predictability has negative connotations. At best it's boring (say, a highly intelligent beaurocrat), at worst, stupid / less human (say, racists talking about another culture being predictably primitive)
• Is there an implication of people, or beings, who are more predictable, having less free will? If your intellectual faculties are limited, or you operate on instinct more than you do on rational or logical deduction, you become more predictable, ergo, predictability == stupidity. (I know this is a fallacy, but I am trying to establish why one might irrationally and subconsciously dehumanise, not arguing in favour of this dehumanisation or trying to defend it)
• Take our favourite pets. Cats and dogs. They are pretty highly developed and if it wasn't for humans, they'd be unchallenged apex predators ruling the world. They display complex behaviours, at times even hard to predict ones. But still, they are animals and behave in reasonably reliable patterns. They are also not able to pass the mirror-test for self awareness, implying they are not (or only in extremely limited ways). So, one could argue they are less human, less intelligent. Now look at insects. Even less intelligent. Even though it could be argued that some (like ants) display a form of swarm intelligence, they are still extremely predictable. (Except for, perhaps, the flight patterns of flies or mosquitoes, which evolution has scrambled into extremely random patterns to avoid them being swatted. But that's just hard-coded into their genes, not an intelligent thought process)
• So, once more. Think of someone you really don't like. Do you ever call them stupid for their actions? Would you ever say "here we go again, they are doing this again". Particularly if they are your boss? Perhaps it helps you cope with their shitty behaviour to dehumanise that person. Make them a lesser human being, to compensate for the fact that they make you feel powerless in their work. If dehumanisation is such an immediate and convenient mechanism to protect yourself from feelings of inferiority, or to stop yourself from being threatened (say, by a different culture), perhaps it is in fact an ingrained behaviour, which expresses itself on a larger scale once fueled by propaganda and political intent. If we identify it and understand how it happens, we may protect ourselves against it by elevating others to a higher status of 'human-ness'.
• When we 'have figured someone out', we are stating we can predict them. Are we putting them beneath us, henceforth? Are they 'less' than us in some ways? It gives us power to be able to predict, so it makes us more powerful than them in some way, so it makes them lesser beings in some ways.

Why am I bringing all this up? In my life, so far, I have gone from being very insecure, mistrusting and scared of people, to much more open, trusting and confident.

The more insecure I was, the more time I spent trying to prove to myself that I was somehow superior to others. Generally using intelligence as an argument (uggggh....). You know, like the goth teenager sitting in their basement, who is oh-so-individual and everyone else is so stupid and nobody understands my pain, etc. (see, dehumanising my past self right there, haha).

The more I started trusting people and the more I started seeing everyone around me as humans, humans just like me, the more I began to see how others still apply these weird dehumanisation mechanisms to make themselves feel superior. This made me wonder whether there is some kind of innate drive to do so. Try to predict others, or paint them as predictable, to prove that you are superior to them, because they would not be able to predict your actions, as you are so far beyond their capabilities.

So yeah, uhm....let me know what comes up in yer heads as you read through this, I'd be most interested to hear your perspectives.

So I've been really excited about this page, but lately I keep coming here, glancing at the front page, and then leaving. I think it's in part the minimalist design and the way the colour of the clicked links is very similar to the colour of the unclicked ones, making it unclear at a first glance which threads one has visited already.

Since the pace of debate is moving much slower than on Reddit here (which I think is a good thing), it would be very useful to have some kind of a 'my discussions' page that you could save threads to - either threads you are participating in or just threads you are excited to see the responses to. This would make it much easier for users to return to interesting discussions without having to browse around ~ for ages trying to find that one interesting topic.

This week, two governments in Australia have taken steps towards negotiating treaties with the native Aboriginal people:

• Victorian Parliament votes on law to negotiate Australia's first Aboriginal treaty

• Indigenous treaty a step closer after Northern Territory government makes historic pledge

Meanwhile, one government says no:

• South Australia government decides not to go ahead with Aboriginal treaties

It's interesting that the two governments moving forwards are Labor Party governments, while the one that's stopping the process is a newly elected Liberal Party government. It's hard not to draw the conclusion that this is a politically partisan issue.

Three examples :

American English have lost the u in word like "color", because it is closer to its phonetics (the u is silent and there's no particular sound associated with "ou"). The letter u has an anglo-norman root.

Swiss French (and for this particular example Belgian French) differs little from standard French, apart from the numbering system. It is ironically more metric than standard French since it streamlines what's left of the base 20 (vigisimasomething) system, i. e. it's "seventy and eighty" ("septante et huitante*") instead of "sixty-ten and four-twenties" ("soixante-dix et quatre-vingts". Historically people all over the world used some sort of base 20 system, probably because we have twenty toes and fingers.

*no one ever use "octante". Belgian people think the Swiss uses it, while Swiss people thinks the Belgian it. I don't know why its that.

Swiss standard German (not dialect) have ditched the Eszett ligature (ß) in favor of a more simple "ss ". That ligature was more common in the middle age.

With those example in mind, do you find value in the "old" vs the "new" way of writing?

(in other words: spelling reformer partisan and opponent : what goes through your mind?)

Yesterday I went to my first ever (recreational) rowing training. I’ve trained gymnastics before and sailed quite a bit.

It’s a 100+ year old club and the gym is pretty small, but the equipment is quite modern.

To keep the story short (there were quite some notable and funny events, but nothing to do with training itself), after I did some quick stretching and warming up, a friendly chap (could be a young trainer) helped me with the ergo and briefly tried to explain to me what all the numbers say.

So I spent most of my first training (probably 40-60' in total) on an ergo (Concept2 Dynamic, I think). Most of the time I had the setting on 3-4, but then lowered it to 2.

When I checked how many Watts I produced (per stroke, I suspect), I averaged at about 60 W and peaked at 200 W – which is comparable to 14-year old girls who train there regularly. The trainer(?) chuckled and told me that this is to be expected and that I obviously have more strength, but they simply have a much more efficient stroke technique, which I am yet to learn in the first place.

So, are there any rowers present who would be willing to share some of their wisdom?

First off, I've noticed a lot of D&D chatter on here, so I figured you all would be a great resource for this. I've never played D&D but after listening to some of The Adventure Zone, I'm really getting into the idea. I want to play with a group of friends, but there are a few people who have never really played an RPG and get somewhat self-conscious playing things like board games. Any recommendations for a good starting point for this sort of situation?

Here are the top ten reddit comments from Feb of 2018, based on their character length multiplied by their votes.

E.g. the first comment has 5,144 characters with a vote of 42,457 so it had the highest rank of 218,398,808.

https://www.reddit.com/r/justneckbeardthings/comments/7wwyw5/neckbeard_crew/du4cbk5
https://www.reddit.com/r/news/comments/7xkstl/shooting_at_south_florida_high_school/du94nag
https://www.reddit.com/r/uwaterloo/comments/7w0dgv/dave_tompkins_is_overrated/dtwzhbz
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/7vwkqg/hey_reddit_what_products_are_identical_to_a_brand/dtvtkzd
https://www.reddit.com/r/news/comments/80xs1v/china_bans_george_orwells_animal_farm_as_xi/duzfoko
https://www.reddit.com/r/NoStupidQuestions/comments/80h9bj/why_is_it_okay_to_cook_some_animals_alive_while/duvwgg8
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/7xztxf/who_is_the_worst_person_youve_ever_met/ducsa86
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/7zwebj/barbershairdressers_of_reddit_how_exactly_do_you/durco2m
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/7wi1g8/what_concept_fucks_you_up_the_most/du13k9x
https://www.reddit.com/r/wifesharing/comments/7wa854/my_bf_is_looking_for_inspiration_what_would_you/duz0q9l

On the whole, there does seem to be a correlation between comment length and comment quality, especially when votes are factored in. More details here:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/e/2PACX-1vRC08EWmy1GgzdrIvR2p9EGUpQpIbYjp8MmvlgfNT4REbXbjxOUUdXBHMqXnF_4OGsR9PrV_-xuehlW/pubhtml

I've been learning la langue française, as the language of renaissance. Also it has a lot of great authors and movie directors, and I think it's just beautiful (not as beautiful as German, but it's another kind of beautiful). So I use the method that works best for me, just take Notre Dame de Paris and translate the shit out of it. Or some other text if I'm feeling lazy to look up the names of clothes from middle ages.

When you’re universally beloved (or just posting a lot of open-ended discussion threads, one of the two), you can get a lot of replies in your inbox, and it can be a pain to mark them as read one by one. It’d be nice just to be able to zap them all.

Or, if there’s a way to do this already, please let me know.

Final score: 4-3

What a game. Congratulations to the Capitals, the victory was well earned.

Congratulations are also in order for the Golden Knights, who reached the finals in their first year as a team and dominated throughout most of the playoffs.

For the last couple of days I've been visiting the site several times a day and leaving after 10 minutes or so.

It's not that the site is bad or the discussion isn't good, but there's been a big lack of discussion I'm interested in. I don't like to take place in discussion of politics, or religion, or LGBT, or whatever. For me, the forums always were a place to meet new people to talk to, without it being a date or making friends or anything, just a friendly talk. Not that there shouldn't be a place for talking about world problems, but I get much more enjoyment from small issues or just getting to know other people.

Which is why I haven't been very active here for the last couple of days. There is all this LGBT talk and Trump and catastrophes. Even in the ~talk, there are 'Homosexual marriage legal or illegal?', 'Do you think school uniforms should be in all American/Canadian schools?', 'It's a Piece of Cake to Bake a Pretty Cake: LGBT+ Discrimination'. There is a fair share of smaller conversations, but they are mostly things I'm not interested in: 'What's your favorite documentary?, 'Advice- Best Tablets for Interactive Training' ― or things I don't know enough about to discuss, like 'How to gauge the degree of someone's self-awareness?'. This leaves very few posts I'm interested in, and I can hardly engage there because everything I could've said has already been said before I saw it.

Everything above is why I was mostly active in my own posts when I first joined as well. And I wanted to create this post to express this frustration(?) with lack of content, and I'm sure a lot of other lurkers will agree with me on that (whether or not they have different interests) ― I'm writing this post for them, too. I have no idea how you'd fix this problem or if it's even fixable, but I think it's important to state it so more active people can notice and so I have someplace to be active on ~.

Non-fictions lovers, what are your favorite subjects to read about, and what are your recommended readings for them? My personal areas of interest are:

American Civil War

• Battle Cry of Freedom by James McPherson - Perhaps the definitive overview of the Civil War
• The Confederate War by Gary Gallagher - A look at the war from the perspective of the Confederacy
• A Short History of Reconstruction by Eric Foner - A relatively brief but complete analysis of the years following the war

Custer

• Cavalier in Buckskin by Robert Utley - A very balanced, comprehensive study of Custer’s life (there is a large hardcover version available that also contains a lot of interesting pictures)
• A Terrible Glory by James Donovan - Well researched and covers more of the aftermath of Custer’s Last Stand than the typical Custer book
• Custer Victorious by Gregory J.W. Urwin - An extensive examination of Custer’s distinguished Civil War career

OJ Simpson

• Without a Doubt by Marcia Clark - A fascinating, detailed read written by the lead prosecutor herself
• The Run of His Life by Jeffrey Toobin - The best book written about the case by someone not directly involved in it
• Murder in Brentwood by Mark Fuhrman - Despite what reservations people may have about Mark Fuhrman, his account of the trial is thorough and eye-opening

The Atomic Bomb

• The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes - A long-winded history of the creation of the bomb, including the physics behind it
• Hiroshima in History and Memory by Michael J. Hogan - A collection of essays detailing the decision to drop the bomb, and the effects it had on Japan and American afterward
• In the Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer by Richard Polenberg - Contains the transcripts of the J. Robert Oppenheimer trial, “father of the atomic bomb,” who was put on trial several years after the end of World War II for being a suspected Soviet spy

I just thought that it might be useful for a person to see how many posts and comments they have made on ~. As that data is already available for manual collection it might be nice to have it available more easily on that profile.

They are not overly long and often give some nice information on local transport, currency, scams, food and cultural etiquette. These are two of their videos. One focusing on the Kyushu island in Japan and the other on Copenhagen in Denmark.

• Kyushu in Japan:
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GpFSqZikbHQ

• Copenhagen:
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nMGrL8NazOw

If any of you know of other good online travel resources, I'd love to hear about it!

Have you ever wondered how little of a difference of input lag you can perceive? With this tool, you can find out.

The screen is split into two halves, and one of them has an artificial amount of input lag (default 50 ms, you can change it) added to the mouse cursor. Figure out which side feels laggier and click on it. After 25 trials, it will show your results. If you can consistently score at least 18/25 correct at a certain amount of lag, then you can probably perceive it. I can go as low as 20-25 ms on my 144 hz monitor.

Be sure to edit one of the files as shown here to disable v-sync, or if you trust me you can download my copy.