However, cyberspace is not, by itself, omniscient. That depends on us humans and, no doubt, on other sentient beings too.
Although humans-or a few of us at least-discovered cyberspace, we are as little children before its vastness, its awesome challenge. For it exposes the timidity of many of our thoughts, the pettiness of much of what we fear, and the superficial quality of many of the things that give us joy.
We enter cyberspace arrogant in our illusions and exit humbled in our uncertainties. Having experienced its ecstatic freedom, we can't wait to escape from our cramped earthly space and return to that new, overwhelming experience.
Cyberspace is like an immense playground for giants; it shows us to be small fry in a Lilliputian school yard.
So what do our spiritual leaders think about cyberspace? Are their doctrines able to encompass it? Do humanity's priests and gurus embrace its universality?
"It is from our respective faiths that we derive our sense of origins, of self, of purpose, of possibility," writes Gerald O. Barney, director of the Millennium Institute, in a "Letter to Our Spiritual Leaders." Barney tells them: "You are our source of inspiration for what we humans and Earth can become. Your dreams are our visions-and our destiny. We depend on you."
In response, only silence issues forth from our divided spiritual leadership.
And what of our vaunted political leaders? Does not cyberspace mock and deny their fictional borders? Their impotent armies? Their illusions of power?
A glance at today's headlines in Cairo, New Delhi, Moscow, Tokyo and Washington reveals a total disregard of cyberspace reality on the part of those engaged in the political peacemaking process.
But how does all this pertain to world government? What has cyberspace to do with it?
The essence of government is communication. And communication is dependent on speed or "feedback." In the days when the horse was the fastest means of communication, government was slow-moving, cumbersome. The distance from Philadelphia to Boston, from Paris to Nice, from Berlin to Munich took two weeks to cover by fast coach. The 20th century accelerated speed to the point where a message can now be transmitted the same distance in a mere millisecond.
Here is one interpretation of how humanity is being affected by this shrinkage of space and compaction of time:
"We're in the midst of the most serious cultural change since the capture of fire," says John Perry Barlow, co-founder (with Mitch Kapor) of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. In a NetGuide interview (September1995), he commented, "How about law as we know it?...If you can manifest yourself anywhere on the planet and conduct affairs under no juridication whatever, invisible to whoever governs, it'll be awfully easy to do whatever you damn well please."
National governments protect geography, Barlow said. "But in cyberspace, there is no geography. So when you govern a land without borders...well, who needs Congress for that?...On the Internet, individuals can come together directly to solve things. That gives you government truly by and for the people."
A parallel viewpoint is inspiring the academic world:
"The globalization process that is currently underway is characterized by a shift from the technological age to the information age in the 'more developed' parts of the world," writes Professor Paul Smoker of Antioch College. "The trend from national economies to a global economy further facilitates an emerging global super-system that impacts on technological, political, economic, social, cultural, environmental and personal security worldwide.... The globalization process is also apparent in the evolution of international nongovernmental organizations-citizens' groups that operate across national boundaries-and in the increasing interaction between citizens of the world."
In his graduate course entitled "World Citizens and Cyberspace," Smoker promises that "students will learn how to use the new information and communication technologies for citizens' action, and will study ways in which transnational individuals and groups are currently using, and planning to use, the Internet to help create a better world..." He also boldly enjoins his students to "demonstrate a commitment to humanity as a whole, rather than to any particular nation or state."
To that end, he assigns them to study our World Citizen Web site on the World Wide Web along with required reading of this writer's Passport to Freedom.
More and more people are awakening to the global consciousness that cyberspace so vividly crystallizes. Dr. Barney of the Millennium Institute suggests that the next few years hold the possibility of a decisive shift in human thinking.
"The entry into the 21st century and the new millennium needs to be understood as an anniversary of Earth, an anniversary in which all nations, cultures and faith traditions participate," he writes. "The 1999-2001 period must be a time when five billion of us humans give up old, 20th century ways of thinking and living; change to a new time and a new purpose; and then start toward the humane and sustainable future that we can all share."
Simply by logging on to the Internet, one becomes a "Netizen," a global technological citizen capable of interacting with millions of fellow Netizens. The Web site of the World Government of World Citizens-https://worldcitizen.org-can easily enable all Netizens to exercise individual sovereignty of political choice. This is provided for in Article 15(2) of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: "No one shall be deprived of his nationality nor denied the right to change his nationality."
In other words, no national official can deny anyone the right to choose his or her political allegiance.
By claiming world citizenship, one expresses the highest planetary civic commitment as an inalienable political right. The World Citizen Web site includes the registration form and application for documents which confirm that highest civic commitment.
Cyberspace continues to evolve so rapidly that its future is impossible to foresee. One thing about it, however, does seem true and immutable: through the totality of cyberspace, a global audience is gradually becoming oriented to universality, which in turn presumes world law and its government.