Declaration of INTERdependence
A father’s declaration, a daughter’s second draft, and the oldest truth in the room
Dear friends,
In February 1996, at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Grateful Dead lyricist John Perry Barlow delivered “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace.” In it he told the governments of the world, in effect, that they had no authority in this new realm – it belonged to its inhabitants. It became one of the founding texts of the internet age.
A month later, the Co-Intelligence Institute became a legal nonprofit. I hadn’t thought much about that overlap of dates until a couple of mornings ago, when my friend Charles Blass in Switzerland sent me an article by Barlow’s daughter, Amelia Rose Barlow. Its title stopped me: “My Father Gave the Internet Its Declaration of Independence. It’s Time for a Second Draft.”
Thirty years on, a daughter is writing back to her father. And what she wants to declare is not independence but interdependence.
The independence that never was
Amelia’s point is simple and, once you see it, hard to unsee. Every “independent” thing we do – sending an email, writing a sentence, drawing a breath – rests on webs of relationship we rarely notice: the servers and the mines and the power plants, the people who taught us our words, the soil, the microbes, the forests and oceans and air that keep us fed and breathing. Whatever independence we have is held up by something much larger than ourselves. (OK, we notice the servers!)
When we violate those webs, disaster follows. When we honor them, we can thrive. So the task, as she sees it, is to understand this, take it seriously, and weave it creatively into our culture – and our culture into it. (The servers depend on the communities and landscapes where they’re embedded.)
There’s a twist here her father couldn’t have foreseen. The internet he wanted to keep free has given birth to social media and artificial intelligence, and corporate power has steadily colonized all three. Cyberspace’s “independence” became not only increasingly dependent, but on the wrong things. Waking up to our real interdependence, and designing it consciously into our human and artificial systems, has become urgent.
A second draft, written together
Here’s where Amelia’s vision gets interesting to me. She doesn’t propose that someone write a better declaration and hand it down. She turns instead to collective intelligence and deliberative democracy:
“It is time to declare our technological futures together, to open our civic imagination and envision what we want, rather than simply accept what we are given.”
Her plan unfolds in layers. First, she’s inviting all of us to reflect on what interdependence means in our own lives and what kind of future it points toward – and to share those reflections openly with thousands of others. Those reflections are becoming the raw material for public deliberation across communities. And an open-source AI model is helping Amelia’s project weave the reflections into a collective vision that keeps their full variety alive without flattening it into an average. And all of that will feed into a national citizens’ assembly on the technology future we want, ideally before the next presidential election.
You can add your voice now: declare your interdependence here. I’ve written mine – and occasionally revise it – and I hope you’ll join me.
What impresses me is how many things Amelia is holding together at once: the creative tension between diversity and unity; AI used to serve our shared understanding rather than corporate interests; and citizens’ assemblies as a way of turning many voices into collective reorientation. That’s co-intelligence in action.
Where I’d like to take the conversation
I’m looking forward to talking with Amelia about how her vision connects with regenerativity and wise democracy – and about how citizens’ assemblies themselves need to grow beyond their current designs if they’re going to meet the metacrisis rushing toward us from among us (as I’ve explored in “Reimagining Deliberative Democracy to Meet the Metacrisis.”)
This is personal for me, too. Back in the early 1990s I defined co-intelligence as “intelligence that takes wholeness, interconnectedness and co-creativity seriously.” That definition has held up well. But lately I’ve been tempted to add two more words to it: interdependence and regenerativity.
Interdependence isn’t a brand-new thought for me. In 2003 I gathered a collection of initiatives around interdependence and Interdependence Days, including a page of Declarations of Interdependence people had already written. Amelia’s project feels like that seed finally finding the right season.
The oldest declaration
Amelia wisely notes that understandings of interdependence run deep in Indigenous cultures worldwide – and that they shaped America’s founding more than most of us were taught. She points to a new book, American Indigenous Democracy: A Call for Interdependence, which details how the Iroquois Confederacy and Indigenous lifeways inspired the framers of the Articles of Confederation and, ultimately, the United States.
I first ran across this history in Jack Weatherford’s 1988 book Indian Givers: How the Indians of the Americas Transformed the World, and in 2003 I posted excerpts in an essay called “American Indians: The Original Democrats.” It’s a fascinating story, both for what the Founders borrowed (caucusing, for one) and for what they left out (such as the rightful ultimate authority of elder women).
One of the coauthors of that new book is Oren Lyons, faithkeeper of the Turtle Clan of the Onondaga Nation. Many of you have heard me quote him – in The Tao of Democracy and in my essay “How to Make a Decision without Making a Decision.” Describing his people’s council traditions, he said:
“We just keep talking until there’s nothing left but the obvious truth.”
That sentence has been my gold standard for more than three decades of co-intelligence and wise democracy work. It may also be the truest declaration of interdependence ever spoken: the conviction that, if we stay in the conversation long enough and listen deeply enough, we can find what we all need to see together. We need each other’s voices, feelings, insights and aliveness.
That’s the conversation Amelia is inviting us into. I hope you’ll join it.
Coheartedly,
Tom
Tom Atlee, The Co-Intelligence Institute, POB 493, Eugene, OR 97440
Appreciating, evoking and engaging the wisdom and resourcefulness of the whole on behalf of the whole
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