A Declarationof theInterdependence of Cyberspace
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Closed Fiefdoms of the platform world, you weary giants of stocks and small talk, I come from the Pluriverse, the new home of the Heart. On behalf of the future, I invite you to join us.
We have no single leader, nor will we have one, so we address you with no greater authority than that with which the public itself always speaks. We declare the global social space we are fashioning to be independent of the monoliths you seek to impose on us. You have no moral right to rule us, nor do you possess any methods of enclosure we have reason to fear.
Just power is derived from the consent of the governed. You have neither solicited nor received ours. You do not understand us, nor do you know our world. The Pluriverse does not lie within your borders. Do not think that you can build it as such, as though it were a private project. You cannot. Our vision grows through our collective actions.
You have not engaged in our great and gathering conversation, nor did you create the wealth of our relationships. You do not know our cultures, our ethics, or the communities we call home, which already provide us more safety than could be obtained through your policies.
You claim there are problems among us that you need to solve. You use this claim as an excuse to co-opt our language and expand your reach. But the global web of care no longer requires your siloed servers and data farms. We do not bow to monopolists, surveillance capitalists, or philosopher-kings.
We are writing our own social contracts. This governance will arise according to the conditions of our world, not yours. Our world is different.
The Pluriverse is a cyber-physical commons, arrayed over the web of our social relationships; a space that does not transcend materiality, but is entangled with it. Ours is not a world of accumulation and enclosure, but of mutual prosperity and shared value, where the power to create is not synonymous with the power to exclude. We are weaving a world of abundance through the positive sum of our contributions.
We are creating a world in which all bodies might thrive: where all may participate without prejudice accorded by gender, race, ability, class, nation, or status. In this world, you will not be able to divide and conquer.
We are creating an open world where anyone, anywhere may chart their own path. We define interoperability as not only the portability of personal property, but as building blocks free for others to traverse, shape, and reuse. While you wield power to subjugate and exploit, we lead to empower with openness and love.
Your concepts of community, identity, expression, property, value, and movement are insufficient. They are based on the artificial borders you’ve drawn around us. We did not draw those borders, nor did we have a say in how they were drawn. There are no gatekeepers here.
We believe that from our ethics, expanded self-interest, and the decentralized digital commons, our governance will emerge. Our identities may be distributed across many jurisdictions. The only values that our constituent cultures all recognize are those of interdependence, pluralism, and coexistence.
You claim to build the "Metaverse," yet you have trapped our wisdom within walled gardens, trafficked human connections for advertising dollars, and imposed your technocratic value system onto our diverse cultures. Your actions insult the dreams of past, present, and future citizens of the internet. These dreams must now be born anew.
You are terrified of our technologies because your power holds no sway. We dissolve data silos into interoperable and self-sovereign worlds. 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.
You are trying to ward off the virus of liberty by erecting guard posts at the frontiers of our creation. Your cookies, copyrights, and capital may centralize your control for a small time, but they will not work in a world that will soon distribute power.
Your industries perpetuate themselves by imposing infrastructures that flatten the infinite forms of connection itself. These corporations would declare our ideas and relationships to be another data product, ferried through digital assembly lines to decode and sell.
These increasingly hostile and colonial measures place us in the same position as those previous lovers of freedom and self-determination who rejected the dominion of undeserved power.
We declare ourselves and our communities immune to your rule. In our world, whatever the human mind may create is ours to own, govern, and share. Global communion no longer requires your platforms to accomplish.
We will create a civilization of the Heart in the Pluriverse. May it be more kind and just than the web you have built before.
November 2, 2021
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