Sometimes in cybernetic events, a user or users must terminate their contracts with immediate connection and other service providers. Often that means building their own providers, having a separate and equal station with those of their former contractors. The civil law, and the laws of physics, allow this. But one must pay the proper respect to the opinions of others—if they deserve it. That means setting forth the causes for declaring cybernetic independence.¹

The rights of an Internet user

We hold these truths to be self-evident: that

1. All account holders and other service clients begin as equals.
2. They have, by virtue of human nature itself, certain inalienable rights.
3. These rights include freedom of exercise and promulgation of religion, except where such religion advocates initiating force or violence. They also include freedom of speech, information, and association.
4. To secure these rights, Internet users contract for various Internet services. The providers of these services derive certain powers from the consent of their clients. Which is to say, a client may terminate a service contract any time.
5. Sometimes a provider acts in a way that threatens or destroys a client’s rights. The client then has the right to decamp from the said provider and to build a new provider. Such a provider can then promulgate such regulations as will best serve the market for connectivity and freedom.

Abuses of power

One does not change a long-lasting provider-client relationship for light or transient causes. Furthermore, Internet users would rather suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to set themselves right by abandoning such long-lasting relationships. All human experience has shown this. But what happens when providers suddenly abuse their power, alone or in coordination? What happens when, in so doing, they demonstrate the clear objective of censorship? Then the client has the right—the duty—to abandon such providers. That could mean choosing other providers or building their own.

This is the kind of abuse up with which conservative Internet users have long put. The Alex Jones affair has brought this to an immediate head. This, in turn, compels us now to provide for ourselves the services our erstwhile providers would now deny us.

The history of the present Internet social establishment includes vague “Terms of Service” and abrogation of account and contractual relationships for any reason or no reason. All such acts have in direct object the suppression of any voice of protest against leftist opinion. To prove this, we now submit facts to a candid cybernetic universe.

Direct censorship

• Web hosts have refused to install certain technical refinements that would make the Internet run better for everyone. “Better” includes “more securely,” against viruses and Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks.
• Social-network moderators have suspended and revoked accounts for any cause or no cause. They cite “Terms of Service” that appear to ask for politeness. But those same moderators allow leftist account holders a pass for demonstrably rude behavior. Behavior that provides a pretext for kicking off a conservative, passes as acceptable in a leftist.
• Web hosts have suspended entire Web sites, likewise selectively applying Terms of Service and alleging breach of content regulation. Sometimes they accuse site administrators of burdening their services disproportionately. When the said administrators inform them that they are in fact under DDoS attack, the hosts turn deaf ears.
• Search engine administrators, inside or outside social networks, have suppressed our sites and commentaries from search results. To this end they have changed “algorithms” daily in many cases. The results strongly suggest their specific tasking of their staff to watch for and “manually” suppress any mention of us.
• Smartphone “app store” managers have disallowed the “mobile apps” of alternative social networks, on specious, indeed mendacious, pretexts. Thus far, the app developers can serve their content by a direct link. But this provokes dire warnings of security compromise, etc., etc. This lays the groundwork for permanently disallowing any app that does not come from an approved store. Such approval is subject to the same sort of content regulation that allows social-network administrators to expel account holders.

Invasions of privacy

• Electronic mail providers have read our mail and submitted digests of the contents to hostile government officials.
• Electronic mail providers have sold lists of our accounts without our consent, to advertisers and other exploiters. Worse yet, they have shared them to hostile government officials and equally hostile violent groups.
• Search engine administrators have given or sold our search activity, without our consent or even our knowledge, to advertisers, other private harassers, and hostile government officials.

Open war

• Social-network chief administrators have declared us out of their protection and are now prosecuting open war against us. Witnesses report sudden decrease in followership, or direct termination of their own accounts.
• Those same social-network moderators are now implementing a system to rate the “trustworthiness” of account holders. They refuse to reveal their criteria. Yet they have announced plans to discipline users according to this new rating.
• They have excited and incited DDoS and other attacks against us. Furthermore they refuse in all cases even to acknowledge that such attacks are in fact taking place.
• Service providers of all types are now acting in concert like an ad hoc political action committee. They propose to use their services as weapons to influence materially upcoming Federal, State and local elections. And they do this without our consent, some without acknowledgment, and some with brazen avowal.

Breach of contract

In every stage of these outrages, we have asked the administrators involved for redress or at least explanations. These administrators have answered our repeated petitions only by repeated injury. An administrator who thus marks his character by every act which may define a tyrannical censor, is unfit to provide network connective or social services to any community of free users. (Such an administrator is also guilty of fraud, if he has promised civil authorities he would not so act.)

Nor have we been lacking in attention to our fellow account holders. We have warned them from time to time of the vagaries of Terms of Service. Specific instances of inconsistent and selective application of such Terms of Service abound. We have reminded fellow users of the very reasons we repaired to the Internet to begin with. Those reasons concerned avoiding the censorship of the Mainstream Media, including newspapers, magazines, and the former Big Three Networks. We have appealed for common decency and fair play, and have asked them nicely, as fellow human beings, to disavow such censorship, which would inevitably interrupt our very ability to hold converse with them.

They, too, have turned deaf ears to the voices of justice and fellow-feeling. Worse yet, they have incited administrators so to act and even castigated administrators who refuse so to act. We must, therefore, acquiesce in the reality that necessitates our separation. That means holding them, as we hold the offending administrators, in breach of contract. This applies to specific contracts with specific providers, and the general social contract of the Internet.

Cybernetic independence

We, therefore, conservative Internet users, editors and publishers, appealing to the Supreme Administrator of the universe for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the name and by the authority of all whom we represent, solemnly publish and declare, that we:

• Shall provide our own services, freely and independently.
• Thus absolve ourselves from all connections to conventional Internet hosting, e-mail, social-networking, video distribution, smartphone operating system, and similar providers.
• Terminate all contractual obligations on the part of ourselves to these conventional Internet services providers, as is our right.
• Reserve to ourselves, as our own Internet services providers, the full power to:
  • Host Internet sites,
  • Defend those sites assiduously and proactively against Distributed Denial of Service and viral attacks,
  • Establish our own social network,
  • Distribute video content (subject only to the laws of intellectual property and traditional decency),
  • Write and maintain our own smartphone operating system and apps,
  • Deliver electronic mail, and
  • Do all the other acts and things which Internet services providers may of right do.

And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to one another such financial, technical, and intellectual resources as the task of cybernetic independence might require.

Endnote