Government is not reason. Government is not eloquence. It is force. And, like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master.

- George Washington

Since humans became conscious of being conscious, the line between the mind and the body, between the thought and the deed, between the material and the immaterial has seemed clear enough to all but a few philosophers and theologians. Suddenly, the line is not so clear at all.

This is because that line has become a space. Somewhere between the meat and the ghost, technology has created an immense zone, cyberspace, where millions may gather their minds simultaneously without being able to bring either their bodies or any of the other possessions that "you can't take with you" when you depart the physical plane.

As more of our social and commercial activities migrate there, pressures are building among The Powers That Were to "civilize" cyberspace. This means duplicating the practices, assumptions, and, most importantly, power relationships that have been serving them so comfortably and long in the physical world.

But that will not work. There is a natural independence, an anti-sovereignty, that will keep cyberspace outside the authority of most existing political institutions.

With a few odd island exceptions such as Singapore—and even there censorship isn't working as well as is widely believed—I don't think the weary, old giants of flesh and steel will ever successfully assert their authority over cyberspace.

I believe that all the existing governments of the world, whether local or national, consensual or imposed, assert their rule over human bodies. And, as George Washington so bluntly observed, they do so by force. But, as I say, there are no bodies in cyberspace. Neither are there houses or bank accounts or cigarette boats. The very location of an action—and thereby that of its perpetrators and instruments—can be impossible to place. Ideas can spread across the Internet like wind- driven fire across dry plains with little regard for the lines various armies have drawn on the world over the past several hundred years.

The natural liberty of cyberspace is guaranteed by its engineering designs, which used open systems and non-hierarchical switching methods to reduce the network's vulnerability to failure. The Internet's use of packet switching—which breaks transmissions into tiny bursts of data that each contain information on the address they're supposed to reach—means that transmissions can take any of many redundant routes to get to their destinations. So, if part of the network is eliminated, whether by equipment failure or nuclear attack, they still are likely to get through. This fluidity of routing applies equally to obstacles that might be thrown up by various authorities, the consequence of which is described by John Gilmore's brilliant observation that "the Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it."

Besides, cyberspace is a global phenomenon, and no government, however noble its intentions, has the moral authority or practical ability to rule the world.

The independence of cyberspace will create tricky issues. The environment may adversely transform the nature of what it is to be a citizen and how a citizenry gathers for the purpose of governing itself. For what is democracy without bodies? What is a precinct without a neighborhood? Who can claim to be a legitimate leader when everyone on the planet may be directly affected by his or her actions?

Democracy is based on the idea that one body in one fixed location may cast one vote. In the absence of the body, or a conveniently definable self, I do not believe that democracy will be a viable method for choosing leaders or formulating policies in the digital dimension.

Many virtual communities may still form, but this leads to other difficulties. First, electronic environments could produce a very direct form of democracy. An agitated "netizenry" might become a mob almost instantaneously, capable of governmental spasms everyone would regret later. I believe that many of the irrationalities of contemporary American government are the consequence of democracy working too well, requiring elected leaders to respond to media-generated mass hallucinations rather than actual problems.

Before we feel overwhelmed by these challenges, we should pause for a moment of gratitude. Cyberspace is still more free and open to all forms of expression than any large social zone humans have ever created. Whatever may happen in the future, we're doing astonishingly well so far.

We seem to take for granted that over a very short time almost 100 million people from all the world's cultures have entered into a place where there are few laws and fewer policemen. A place where there are almost no generally agreed-upon standards of any but the most technical nature. A place where there are no leaders nor any method of formally choosing them, where most of the inhabitants are invisible and blind, where everything is changing faster than we can learn it. And yet we have achieved so far an astonishingly functional society.

Crime is almost unknown among us. And trust seems more the rule than the exception. While the traditional media peddle abundant tales of sexual predation on the young, I feel perfectly safe in putting photographs of my three beautiful young daughters on my home page along with their street address.

The press also howls constantly about malignant little nihilists cracking into and trashing computer systems, but my fairly extensive experience with computer crackers indicates that they are as intolerant of those who damage systems as spelunkers would be of anyone they caught snapping off stalactites. As far as I can tell, the abundant opportunities for digital larceny and vandalism haven't yet resulted in much damage or theft.

Assuming you accept my argument that the system we have is working, there remains the question of whether it will continue to work as the economic stakes increase, the cultural demographics diversify, and improvements in technology transform the virtual experience. As the engineers would ask, "Does it scale?" I am inclined to think that it will, at least in the near term.

When I consider the problems bearing down on us in the world of mind and not meat—for instance, in maintaining economic control over one's intellectual products—I see likely technical solutions (rather than legal ones). While cryptography presents some potential problems, notably in the area of taxing an economy that can increasingly make itself invisible, its ability to define boundaries feels like the answer to many of the social problems I can imagine.

I think that one of the ways in which we will be able maintain the general civility of cyberspace will be through our ability to tightly control access to certain virtual spaces that can set their own ethical standards, much as communities do in the physical world. Cryptography will also make it possible for marginal or even outlaw communities to exist so invisibly that they won't discomfort the larger populace.

While cyberspace would appear to lack the sort of government we're trained to recognize, something is already working here, and I think it will continue to work. We need to honor and understand what that is before we set about to fix what may not be broken.

Mr. Barlow is a retired cattle rancher and former lyricist for the Grateful Dead. He is also the person who popularized the use of the word "cyberspace" to describe the on-line world. He can be reached at barlow@eff.org.