Overclocked | Page 9

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.'
"That's from the Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace. It was
written 12 years ago. I thought it was one of the most beautiful things

I'd ever read. I wanted my kid to grow up in a world where cyberspace
was free -- and where that freedom infected the real world, so
meatspace got freer too.
He swallowed hard and scrubbed at his eyes with the back of his hand.
Van awkwardly patted him on the shoe.
"My beautiful son and my beautiful wife died today. Millions more, too.
The city is literally in flames. Whole cities have disappeared from the
map."
He coughed up a sob and swallowed it again.
"All around the world, people like us are gathered in buildings like this.
They were trying to recover from last night's worm when disaster
struck. We have independent power. Food. Water.
"We have the network, that the bad guys use so well and that the good
guys have never figured out.
"We have a shared love of liberty that comes from caring about and
caring for the network. We are in charge of the most important
organizational and governmental tool the world has ever seen. We are
the closest thing to a government the world has right now. Geneva is a
crater. The East River is on fire and the UN is evacuated.
"The Distributed Republic of Cyberspace weathered this storm
basically unscathed. We are the custodians of a deathless, monstrous,
wonderful machine, one with the potential to rebuild a better world.
"I have nothing to live for but that."
There were tears in Van's eyes. He wasn't the only one. They didn't
applaud him, but they did one better. They maintained respectful, total
silence for seconds that stretched to a minute.
"How do we do it?" Popovich said, without a trace of sarcasm.
#

The newsgroups were filling up fast. They'd announced them in
news.admin.net-abuse.email, where all the spamfighters hung out, and
where there was a tight culture of camaraderie in the face of full-out
attack.
The new group was alt.november5-disaster.recovery,
with .recovery.governance, .recovery.finance, .recovery.logistics
and .recovery.defense hanging off of it. Bless the wooly alt. hierarchy
and all those who sail in her.
The sysadmins came out of the woodwork. The Googleplex was online,
with the stalwart Queen Kong bossing a gang of rollerbladed grunts
who wheeled through the gigantic data-center swapping out dead boxen
and hitting reboot switches. The Internet Archive was offline in the
Presidio, but the mirror in Amsterdam was live and they'd redirected
the DNS so that you'd hardly know the difference. Amazon was down.
Paypal was up. Blogger, Typepad and Livejournal were all up, and
filling with millions of posts from scared survivors huddling together
for electronic warmth.
The Flickr photostreams were horrific. Felix had to unsubscribe from
them after he caught a photo of a woman and a baby, dead in a kitchen,
twisted into an agonized heiroglyph by the bioagent. They didn't look
like Kelly and 2.0, but they didn't have to. He started shaking and
couldn't stop.
Wikipedia was up, but limping under load. The spam poured in as
though nothing had changed. Worms roamed the network.
.recovery.logistics was where most of the action was.
> We can use the newsgroup voting mechanism to hold regional
> elections
Felix knew that this would work. Usenet newsgroup votes had been
running for more than twenty years without a substantial hitch.

> We'll elect regional representatives and they'll pick a Prime
> Minister.
The Americans insisted on President, which Felix didn't like. Seemed
too partisan. His future wouldn't be the American future. The American
future had gone up with the White House. He was building a bigger
tent than that.
There were French sysadmins online from France Telecom. The EBU's
data-center had been spared in the attacks that hammered Geneva, and
it was filled with wry Germans whose English was better than Felix's.
They got on well with the remains of the BBC team in Canary Wharf.
They spoke polyglot English in .recovery.logistics, and Felix had
momentum on his side. Some of the admins were cooling out