The Internet treats censorship as a malfunction and routes around it.
Interpretation
The internet inherently resists censorship by finding ways to bypass restrictions.
This quote by John Perry Barlow emphasizes the resilient nature of the internet against attempts at censorship. It suggests that rather than being hindered by restrictions, the technology and the community will adapt and find alternative pathways to ensure freedom of information and expression.
In practice
This quote is perfect for a presentation on online freedom of speech.
With the development of the Internet...we are in the middle of the most transforming technological event since the capture of fire. I used to think that it was just the biggest thing since Gutenberg, but now I think you have to go back farther.
The Internet may well disempower the nation state, but at the same time, it also strengthens certain specific state functions - like surveillance. As a political entity, it doesn't empower the nation sate. It creates the availability of much more data than the digestive system of the nation state could possibly assimilate.
If all ideas have to be bought, then you have an intellectually regressive system that will assure you have a highly knowledgeable elite and an ignorant mass.
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.
The Internet amplifies power in all respects. It can grossly exaggerate the power of the individual.
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.
Today's environment is beginning to threaten today's organizations, finding them seriously deficient in their nervous system design... The degree of coordination, perception, rational adaptation, etc., which will appear in the next generation of human organizations will drive our present organizational forms, with their clumsy nervous systems, into extinction.
We want to build intelligence that augments human abilities and experiences.
We must develop as quickly as possible technologies that make possible a direct connection between brain and computer, so that artificial brains contribute to human intelligence rather than opposing it.
The true end users of Facebook are the marketers who want to reach and influence us. They are Facebook's paying customers; we are the product. And we are its workers. The countless hours that we - and the young, particularly - spend on our profiles are the unpaid labor on which Facebook justifies its stock valuation.
Over the last ten years, technological advances have dramatically lowered the financial bar for starting a new company, but the courage bar for building a great company remains as high as it has ever been.
We believe a truly new kind of game entertainment will not be realized unless there is a new way to connect a player to his game.
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