Barlow's prescient Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace was written at the World Economic Forum, where he had been invited to speak and was late on a deadline for the book 24 Hours in Cyberspace. "I was there to be a dancing bear because they had just discovered the Internet and they wanted to show how hip they were," he says. "We had passed the Communications Decency Act, which would have made it a felony and up to a $100,000 fine using such words that I had heard used many times in the Senate cafeteria. It was just the most ridiculous. I was simply stating that it was going to be very difficult for the physical world to impose sovereignty on cyberspace. Even though the relationship of cyberspace to the physical world is exactly that of mind and body, it is difficult for the body to locate the mind and impose anything on it."