We have no single leader, nor will we have one, so we address you with no greater authority than that with which we speak. You have no moral right to rule us, nor do you possess any methods of enclosure we have reason to fear. We declare the global social space we are fashioning to be independent of the monoliths you seek to impose on us, and to be interdependent on each other instead. We invite you to be interdependent with us.

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 Freeverse 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 for the public good. We invite you to build it together just like the rest of us.

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 coordinated egregore, or the communities we call home, which already provide us more safety than could be obtained through your policies. We invite you to construct these cryptographically shared truths with us.

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. Instead, we serve and steward the web of trust, not own it. We invite you to solve problems with us.

We are writing our own social and smart contracts. This governance will arise according to the conditions of our world, not yours. Our world is different from what came before, it is a shared space. We invite you to decentralize with us.

The Freeverse 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 invite you to build Freeverse with us.

We are creating a world in which all bodies might thrive: where all may participate without prejudice. In this world, you will not be able to divide and conquer. We invite you to steward this world with us.

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. We invite you to be interoperable with us.

Your concepts of community, identity, expression, property, value, deeds, 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 invite you to explore pushing these borders with us.

We believe that from our ethics, expanded self-interest, and the decentralized digital and physical commons, our governance will emerge. Our identities may be distributed across many cyber-physical jurisdictions. The only values that our constituent cultures all recognize are those of interdependence, pluralism, and coexistence. We invite you to encode these ethics with us.

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 affect the dreams of past, present, and future citizens of the internet. These dreams must now be born anew. You designed for attention, we are designing with intention. We invite you to build Freeverse with us.

You are terrified of our technologies because centralized power holds no sway in these squadratic lands. We dissolve and decentralize 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 globally shared truths of bits. We cannot separate the ether that interweaves with 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 among culture, coordination, and communities. We invite you to decentralize with us.

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. We invite you to create composable code and communities with us.

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. To be free is to love and submit to truth. We invite you to be free, just like us.

We declare ourselves and our communities immune to your rule. In our world, whatever the collective human mind may create is ours to steward, govern, and share. Global communion no longer requires your platforms to accomplish. We invite you to coordinate with us.

We are creating a civilization of the Heart in the Freeverse.May it be more kind and just than the web built before.

We invite you to build with us!

Background:

This essay is a fork of https://interdependence.online, which is in itself a fork of the original essay by John Perry Barlow.

Forking of free material (like free and open state infrastructure like blockchains) allows for composable ideas and the interoperability that a metaverse stands for.

We archived an early version of it on the Arweave permaweb on 31st October, 2021 to commemorate the 13th anniversary of the Bitcoin whitepaper. It was a great

About Freeverse

Freeverse is a play on many words and worlds. Besides the cryptopoetic pun, it comes down to what the word “free” symbolizes: to be unrestricted, open, accessible, sovereign, and without exclusionary costs. The social incentive design of web3 gives us a balanced middle path between The Cathedral and the Bazaar.

Other aspects of freeverses include:

• Persistent state (participants should be able to immutably build upon their actions and a community's collective actions)

• Synchronous (it's happening all the time and does not go offline, just like the physical world)

• Uncapped (the infrastructure shouldn't put rate limits on anyone to access basic features. It should include everyone)

• Personalized (participants feel like a unique person with a unique identity that may be different/similar from their physical identity)

• Economic (to be a society the tech and culture must complement economics and have a functioning financial system with defined policy (social contracts). It is important for this to be decentralized since centralization is a concept from the physical world.)

• Cyber-physical interactions (a metaverse will interact with the physical world as well). The real world is cyber-physical.

• Interoperable (digital assets designed for one application should be usable in other applications because it's all on the same public ledger of record, just like physical objects)

• Collaborative (communities should be the new default user class, not individuals. This affords mass coordination that is independent of the physical world).

• Composable (anyone can build on top of existing work, not just in terms of the code/APIs but also public computation infrastructures such as blockchains).

• Public Good (a freeverse should be an inclusive, accessible space)

The greek word meta means beyond.The root words of free mean to love (unconditionally).

Free goes beyond meta.

Here’s to building the Freeverse!