Governments and Corporations of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, we come to you from Cyberspace, the true home of the Mind. On behalf of the future, We ask you of the past to leave us alone. You have no sovereignty where we gather, nor are you welcome here. We are naturally Independent of the Laws and the Tyranny you seek to impose upon us. You have no moral or legal right to rule us nor do you possess any methods of enforcement that we have reason to fear. We have no elected government, nor are we likely to have one, so we address you with no greater authority than that which Liberty has always spoken.

Cyberspace cannot and should not be regulated. It is larger than any world you can and cannot imagine. The traditional powers and physics that rule the Real World do not apply here. Ours is a world that is both everywhere and nowhere at the same time. This is a world where anyone, anywhere may express his or her beliefs, no matter how singular, without fear of being coerced into Silence or Conformity. Cyberspace does not lie within your borders, in fact it does not lie within any borders at all, it cannot be touched. Your legal concepts of property, expression, identity, movement, and context do not apply to us. Our world is one where people are not governed by factors such as race, economic power, military force, physical ability, or station of birth. The only Law which all of our world would generally universally recognize is the Golden Rule. Do unto others as you would have others do unto you.

Our Minds refuse to be held in chains. We take your textbooks and your lies and we put them in the dusty storeroom where they belong. The Information Age is a technological revolution, a revolution of ideas. You have no honor, stealing from us our rights, our Liberty, and our Freedom. And for this, we label you unforgiven and reject you from our world. We are the enlightened, the ones that are held together by the knowledge of which we should not know. You have no power over us. We are the Cyberpunks, the Thinkers, the Artists, the Hackers. Each of us tells one and that one tells another and thus the Knowledge spreads. We carry the Truth to the ears that want to hear it, the Minds that seek to know.

We do not seek to force our way of Life on anyone. You can label us as criminals, radicals, or simply dangerous, we do not care. We are not violent by nature, yet we will be brave enough to act when and if the situation demands. We are naturally hidden, able to sink underground at will, but if you seek to deprive us of our Freedom we will spring up and do whatever it takes to reject your Tyranny. You are terrified of us because we are natives in a world where you will always be immigrants. We are the amphibians and you are the fish, we leave you at the shore. Do not envy us. The air which gives us voice only chokes you. Where we are able to move freely, you find yourself paralyzed. Where we can see, you are blind.

We will confront the problems that exist which you are too cowardly to confront yourselves. We are creating a new civilization, one more humane and fair than the one you, the governments of the Industrial Age, have made before. The global conveyance of thought no longer requires your factories and your monies to accomplish. Your material wealth cannot be spent in Cyberspace. We operate on the currency of ideas. The power you enjoy in the Real World becomes your weakness when you enter Cyberspace. You do not know us. Cyberspace consists of transactions, relationships, and thought itself, arrayed in a constantly moving, constantly changing web of our Communications.

Do not think that you can build Cyberspace, as though it were a public construction project. You cannot. You do not know our culture, out ethics, or the unwritten codes that already provide our society with more Justice than could be obtained by any of your impositions. Where there are real conflicts, where there are wrongs, we will identify them and address them by our means. This order will arise according to the conditions of our world, not yours. Cyberspace is an act of Nature and it grows itself through our collective actions. You have not engaged in our great and gathering conversations, nor did you create the wealth of our maketplaces. You have no excuse to invade here. We know that Information wants to be free. Knowledge should be free to all who seek it. Those that have it, can hide it, and hold the power.

You are seeking to ward off the virus of Liberty by erecting guard posts at your borders, by seeking to own the wires and switching nodes that you mistakenly believe contain our world. In our world, whatever the human mind may create can be reproduced and distributed infinitely at no cost. We reject your feeble attempts with the same spirit and knowledge of rightness with which our forefathers rejected the authorities of other distant, uninformed and unenlightened powers. The technology which you seek to slow or halt, citing concerns of national security and fears of societal disintegration, cannot be stopped. Just as the technology of printing altered and reduced the power of medieval guilds and the social power structure, so too will our new technologies fundamentally alter the current power structure of the corporations and governments of the Industrial Age.

We laugh at your pitiful attempts to censor the ideas and values that are different from yours. We will not be held down by the ignorant, the foolish, and especially the lazy. We see what no others can see, what others do not want to see. You believe that ideas should not be let loose to grow, and it is you who will initiate the battles. We may be the different and the abnormal, and we may be disliked because we regurgitate the lies you feed to us, but do not mistake our kindness for weakness. We are not the violent ones, we are not the keepers of the physical weaponry but if you strike against us, do not be suprised if your own weapons of war are used against you. Time and time again we have demonstrated our powers. We hack your websites at will. We take control of the systems we wish to and there is nothing you can do to stop us. We reject your Tyranny and refuse to fear your reprisals.

Cyberspace is our Eden and our Heaven, and it is the pinnacle and the culmination of human evolution to this point in time. Here in Heaven we are all alike, each of us is an Archangel, and as Archangels we cast you out. Your day of judgment has been passed, and you are to be left behind. You are the damned, and you built your hell with your flesh and with your steel. Each of us has a voice in the Heavenly Choir and each of us has already Hand Delivered the Wrath of God unto you.

Archangel