John Perry Barlow

From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism
by Fred Turner
Published 31 Aug 2006

Reprint in Whole Earth Review, no. 68 (Fall 1990): 44 –57, available at http://www.eff.org/Misc/Publications/ John_Perry_Barlow/HTML/crime_and_puzzlement_1.html (accessed September 27, 2005). ———. “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace.” 1996. Available at http://www .eff.org/barlow/Declaration-Final.html (accessed November 15, 2004). B i b l i o g ra p h y [ 293 ] ———. “Jack In, Young Pioneer! Keynote essay for the 1994 Computerworld College Edition.” Available at http://www.eff.org/Misc/Publications/John_Perry_Barlow/ HTML/jack_in_young_pioneer.html (accessed September 27, 2005). Barnes, Susan B. Online Connections: Internet Interpersonal Relationships.

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Perhaps the people to whom this book owes the most are those whose lives and work it explores. They have been extraordinarily open and [ x ] Acknowledgments forthcoming, devoting hours and sometimes days to helping me understand their histories. For all of their help, I’d like to thank Bob Albrecht, Dennis Allison, John Perry Barlow, Reva Basch, Keith Britton, Lois Britton, John Brockman, Michael Callahan, John Coate, Doug Engelbart, Bill English, Lee Felsenstein, Cliff Figallo, David Frohman, Asha Greer (formerly Barbara Durkee), Katie Hafner, Paul Hawken, Alan Kay, Kevin Kelly, Art Kleiner, Butler Lampson, Liza Loop, John Markoff, Jane Metcalfe, David Millen, Nancy Murphy, Richard Raymond, Danica Remy, Howard Rheingold, Louis Rossetto, Peter Schwartz, Mark Stahlman, Gerd Stern, Shirley Streshinsky, Larry Tesler, Paul Tough, Jim Warren, and Gail Williams.

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In 1985 he gathered them again on what would become perhaps the most influential computer conferencing system of the decade, the Whole Earth ’Lectronic Link, or the WELL. Throughout the late 1980s and early 1990s, Brand and other members of the network, including Kevin Kelly, Howard Rheingold, Esther Dyson, and John Perry Barlow, became some of the most-quoted spokespeople for a countercultural vision of the Internet. In 1993 all would help create the magazine that, more than any other, depicted the emerging digital world in revolutionary terms: Wired. By recounting their history, this book reveals and helps to explain a complex intertwining of two legacies: that of the military-industrial research culture, which first appeared during World War II and flourished across the cold war era, and that of the American counterculture.

Barefoot Into Cyberspace: Adventures in Search of Techno-Utopia
by Becky Hogge , Damien Morris and Christopher Scally
Published 26 Jul 2011

In 1990 (the year of the first networked computer virus), the WELL was Harpers magazine’s cyberspatial venue of choice when it decided to investigate the darker side of computer hacking by inviting New York-based crackers including Phiber Optik and Acid Phreak to join the techno-hippies for an online debate. John Perry Barlow, former lyricist of the Grateful Dead and now the unofficial scribe of the WELL community, documented the experience in his essay Crime And Puzzlement: These kids were fractious, vulgar, immature, amoral, insulting, and too damned good at their work. Worse, they inducted a number of former kids like myself into Middle Age.

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But although so-called “impact litigation” remains a central part of the its operations to this day, as legislators began to ponder how to regulate the ’net, the EFF’s work quickly stretched beyond the courtroom and into the corridors of Washington DC. It was in reaction to the US government’s Telecommunications Act of 1996, which he labelled an “atrocity [that would] place more restrictive constraints on the conversation in Cyberspace than presently exist in the Senate cafeteria”, that John Perry Barlow penned his most famous work, the Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace. The text, which continues to be extensively cited by those wishing to capture the early libertarian idealism of the ’net, begins: Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind.

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We, the technoids, know the future and are spelling it out for you. That’s what Utopia is. It’s there in Plato and it’s there in Thomas More. “Utopias in practice are invariably Dystopias. So Utopia tells you that Dystopia will happen when you try to plan ahead.” In the final paragraphs of his declaration, John Perry Barlow’s defies the ability of states to regulate the ’net, and sets out his belief in the virtual Utopia which is to come: In the United States, you have today created a law, the Telecommunications Reform Act, which repudiates your own Constitution and insults the dreams of Jefferson, Washington, Mill, Madison, DeToqueville, and Brandeis.

Rise of the Machines: A Cybernetic History
by Thomas Rid
Published 27 Jun 2016

Michael Benedikt (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991), 109. 111.Morningstar and Farmer, interview, April 24, 2014. 112.Ibid. 113.Howard Rheingold, “Teledildonics: Reach Out and Touch Someone,” Mondo 2000 2 (Summer 1990): 52–54. 114.John Perry Barlow, Lee Felsenstein, and Clifford Stoll, “Is Computer Hacking a Crime?” Harper’s 280, no. 1678 (March 1, 1990): 51–52. 115.Ibid., 53. 116.John Perry Barlow, “Crime and Puzzlement: In Advance of the Law on the Electronic Frontier,” Whole Earth Review 68 (Fall 1990): 47. 117.Michael Alexander, “Secret Service Busts Alleged Crime Ring,” Computerworld, May 14, 1990, 128. 118.Barlow et al., “Is Computer Hacking a Crime?

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Computer networks were liberation: “individuals and small groups that go off to start learning how to program, reprogram, boot up, activate, and format their own brains.”76 Leary’s prose captivated droves of students: “We are creatures crawling to the center of the cybernetic world,” he told them, “But cybernetics are the stuff of which the world is made. Matter is simply frozen information.”77 Leary’s language resonated with an emerging subculture. The Grateful Dead’s songwriter John Perry Barlow once described him as a reverse canary in the coal mine, meaning that whatever Tim Leary was interested in, mass culture would discover a few years later.78 Several of the Bay Area firms saw marketing potential in Leary. Autodesk asked him whether he would be willing to pitch their cyberspace vision in a promotional video.

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“Cyberwear,” for Leary and early 1990s counterculture, was a “mutational technology.” Individual brains could now have out-of-body experiences, just as “landware” like legs and lungs had permitted fish to escape the water and have out-of-water experiences. Intrigued by the hype, and an admirer of Leary, Grateful Dead lyricist John Perry Barlow wanted to see for himself. The problem, he understood, had long been the interface. During the twenty years leading up to 1990, human relations with “these magic boxes” had become ever more intimate, at a fast clip. First came austere batch-processing punch cards as input devices—with simple printers as output devices, of the kind Wiener had used when he first interacted with a computer.

Cult of the Dead Cow: How the Original Hacking Supergroup Might Just Save the World
by Joseph Menn
Published 3 Jun 2019

Another Prankster, visionary writer and marketer Stewart Brand, would also help spread the good news about the coming age of computing. Brand’s outlets included the ecology-oriented magazine Whole Earth Catalog and the WELL, the pioneering West Coast online community. Among Mann’s friends was Dead lyricist and future WELL regular John Perry Barlow. As a Wesleyan college student, Barlow had begun visiting acid guru Timothy Leary, and he introduced the Dead to Leary in 1967. Later, he wrote songs for the Dead, including “Cassidy,” a tribute to a child that weaves in the history of Beat icon Neal Cassady, still another Prankster. The Dead attended and sometimes performed at Kesey’s “Acid Test” parties, and they became technology enthusiasts as well, encouraging the taping of live shows.

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By the time of his July 1990 trial, Neidorf was majoring in political science in college and disinclined to settle. Neidorf knew the manual had been stolen, but he hadn’t broken into machines himself and had not profited from the theft—Phrack was free to readers. Neidorf’s trial became a pivotal moment for hackers and their defenders, in large part because of Jesse Dryden’s family friend, John Perry Barlow, the freewheeling Grateful Dead lyricist and early fan of online communities who would be a major influence on cDc. Barlow’s fellow acid-taking Deadhead Stewart Brand had spawned the online community the WELL in 1985, and Barlow was a prolific and eloquent contributor. For those with primitive online access via modems, university networks, or other means, it was a mega bulletin board, broken up by topic.

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Do you want to run around like idiots or get something done?’” Laird was becoming the new wise elder, the role Chris Tucker had played. Like Chris Tucker, Laird wasn’t coming from nowhere. He was building on the politicization that had been expressed most dramatically earlier in 1996 by the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s John Perry Barlow, a libertarian Republican. While a party had raged on around him during the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Barlow had read that an over-the-top attempt to ban web porn had just been signed into law in America as part of telecom legislation. “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace” was Barlow’s over-the-top response.

The Internet Is Not the Answer
by Andrew Keen
Published 5 Jan 2015

The WELL captured much of the countercultural utopianism of early online users who believed that the distributed structure of the technology created by Internet architects like Paul Baran, with its absence of a central dot, represented the end of traditional government power and authority. This was most memorably articulated by John Perry Barlow, an early WELL member and lyricist for the Grateful Dead, in his later 1996 libertarian manifesto “Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace.” “Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of mind,” Barlow announced from, of all places, Davos, the little town in the Swiss Alps where the wealthiest and most powerful people meet at the World Economic Forum each year.

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So, in answer to Kay’s question, I pitched him all the standard clichés of the time about the economic potential of the Web. I explained how it was an “interactive” and “frictionless” medium for distributing content in which large media companies would be “distintermediated” by agile Web startups. Quoting Web idealists like John Perry Barlow, I promised the magazine publisher that “information wants to be free,” although I had no evidence that information had volition and could demand its own emancipation. Most of all, I presented the Web as a virtual Soho. The Web would create an “abundant” cultural economy, I promised, a cornucopia of music, photographs, writing, and movies where everyone would eventually be able to see, watch, and read anything they chose.

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Between 2002 and 2012, for example, the US Bureau of Labor Statistics reported a 45% drop in the number of professional working musicians—falling from over 50,000 to around 30,000.17 One of the most misleading myths about online piracy is that it’s a bit of harmless fun—an online rave organized by delusional idealists, like Electronic Frontier Foundation founder John Perry Barlow, who just want information to be free. But nothing could be further from the truth.18 Today, online piracy is the big business of peer-to-peer and BitTorrent portals that profit, mostly in advertising revenue, from the availability of stolen content. A report, for example, by the Digital Citizen Alliance, which closely examined the “business models” of over five hundred illegal sites peddling stolen intellectual goods, found that these websites brought in $227 million in ad revenues in 2013, with the average annual advertising sales of the largest thirty of these sites being $4.4 million.19 The most obvious beneficiaries of this economic rape of the creative community are the criminals themselves—thieves like the New Zealand–based Kim Dotcom, the mastermind behind Megaupload, which, at its height, had 180 million registered users and accounted for 4% of all Internet traffic.

Content: Selected Essays on Technology, Creativity, Copyright, and the Future of the Future
by Cory Doctorow
Published 15 Sep 2008

Copyright notice: This entire work (with the exception of the introduction by John Perry Barlow) is copyright 2008 by Cory Doctorow and released under the terms of a Creative Commons US Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/us/). Some Rights Reserved. The introduction is copyright 2008 by John Perry Barlow and released under the terms of a Creative Commons US Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/us/). Some Rights Reserved. Publication history and acknowledgments: Introduction: 2008, John Perry Barlow Microsoft Research DRM Talk (This talk was originally given to Microsoft's Research Group and other interested parties from within the company at their Redmond offices on June 17, 2004.)

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(Originally published as "How Big Media's Copyright Campaigns Threaten Internet Free Expression," InformationWeek, November 5, 2007) Giving it Away (Originally published on Forbes.com, December 2006) Science Fiction is the Only Literature People Care Enough About to Steal on the Internet (Originally published in Locus Magazine, July 2006) How Copyright Broke (Originally published in Locus Magazine, September, 2006) In Praise of Fanfic (Originally published in Locus Magazine, May 2007) Metacrap: Putting the torch to seven straw-men of the meta-utopia (Self-published, 26 August 2001) Amish for QWERTY (Originally published on the O'Reilly Network, 07/09/2003, http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/wireless/2003/07/09/amish qwerty.html) Ebooks: Neither E, Nor Books (Paper for the O'Reilly Emerging Technologies Conference, San Diego, February 12, 2004) Free(konomic) E-books (Originally published in Locus Magazine, September 2007) The Progressive Apocalypse and Other Futurismic Delights (Originally published in Locus Magazine, July 2007) When the Singularity is More Than a Literary Device: An Interview with Futurist-Inventor Ray Kurzweil (Originally published in Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, June 2005) Wikipedia: a genuine Hitchhikers' Guide to the Galaxy — minus the editors (Originally published in The Anthology at the End of the Universe, April 2005) Warhol is Turning in His Grave (Originally published in The Guardian, November 13, 2007) The Future of Ignoring Things (Originally published on InformationWeek's Internet Evolution, October 3, 2007) Facebook's Faceplant (Originally published as "How Your Creepy Ex-Co-Workers Will Kill Facebook," in InformationWeek, November 26, 2007) The Future of Internet Immune Systems (Originally published on InformationWeek's Internet Evolution, November 19, 2007) All Complex Ecosystems Have Parasites (Paper delivered at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference, San Diego, California, 16 March 2005) READ CAREFULLY (Originally published as "Shrinkwrap Licenses: An Epidemic Of Lawsuits Waiting To Happen" in InformationWeek, February 3, 2007) World of Democracycraft (Originally published as "Why Online Games Are Dictatorships," InformationWeek, April 16, 2007) Snitchtown (Originally published in Forbes.com, June 2007) Dedication For the founders of the Electronic Frontier Foundation: John Perry Barlow, Mitch Kapor and John Gilmore For the staff — past and present — of the Electronic Frontier Foundation For the supporters of the Electronic Frontier Foundation Introduction by John Perry Barlow San Francisco - Seattle - Vancouver - San Francisco Tuesday, April 1, 2008 "Content," huh? Ha! Where's the container? Perhaps these words appear to you on the pages of a book, a physical object that might be said to have "contained" the thoughts of my friend and co-conspirator Cory Doctorow as they were transported in boxes and trucks all the way from his marvelous mind into yours.

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Send us your review Also available on Feedbooks: "The Prophet", Gibran "Thus Spake Zarathustra", Nietzsche "The Magnificent Ambersons", Tarkington "The Good Soldier", Ford "The Red and the Black", Stendhal "Les Misérables", Hugo "Captain Blood", Sabatini "Tess of the d'Urbervilles", Hardy "Lord Jim", Conrad "Stranger Things Happen ", Link www.feedbooks.com Food for the mind Table of Contents Dedication Introduction by John Perry Barlow Microsoft Research DRM Talk The DRM Sausage Factory Happy Meal Toys versus Copyright: How America chose Hollywood and Wal-Mart, and why it's doomed us, and how we might survive anyway Why Is Hollywood Making A Sequel To The Napster Wars? You DO Like Reading Off a Computer Screen How Do You Protect Artists?

The Hacker Crackdown
by Bruce Sterling
Published 15 Mar 1992

Chicago Task Force raids Steve Jackson Games, Inc., "Mentor," and "Erik Bloodaxe" in Austin. May 7,8,9. USSS and Arizona Organized Crime and Racketeering Bureau conduct "Operation Sundevil" raids in Cincinnatti, Detroit, Los Angeles, Miami, Newark, Phoenix, Pittsburgh, Richmond, Tucson, San Diego, San Jose, and San Francisco. May. FBI interviews John Perry Barlow re NuPrometheus case. June. Mitch Kapor and Barlow found Electronic Frontier Foundation; Barlow publishes CRIME AND PUZZLEMENT manifesto. July 24-27. Trial of Knight Lightning. 1991 February. CPSR Roundtable in Washington, D.C. March 25-28. Computers, Freedom and Privacy conference in San Francisco.

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NuPrometheus was never publicly charged with a crime, or prosecuted, or jailed. But there were no further illicit releases of Macintosh internal software. Eventually the painful issue of NuPrometheus was allowed to fade. In the meantime, however, a large number of puzzled bystanders found themselves entertaining surprise guests from the FBI. One of these people was John Perry Barlow. Barlow is a most unusual man, difficult to describe in conventional terms. He is perhaps best known as a songwriter for the Grateful Dead, for he composed lyrics for "Hell in a Bucket," "Picasso Moon," "Mexicali Blues," "I Need a Miracle," and many more; he has been writing for the band since 1970.

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People of this sort may have a set of windchimes and a dog with a knotted kerchief 'round its neck, but they're also quite likely to own a multimegabyte Macintosh running MIDI synthesizer software and trippy fractal simulations. These days, even Timothy Leary himself, prophet of LSD, does virtual-reality computer-graphics demos in his lecture tours. John Perry Barlow is not a member of the Grateful Dead. He is, however, a ranking Deadhead. Barlow describes himself as a "techno-crank." A vague term like "social activist" might not be far from the mark, either. But Barlow might be better described as a "poet"—if one keeps in mind Percy Shelley's archaic definition of poets as "unacknowledged legislators of the world."

The Transparent Society: Will Technology Force Us to Choose Between Privacy and Freedom?
by David Brin
Published 1 Jan 1998

Some of societyʼs best and brightest minds have begun extolling a coming “golden age of privacy,” when no one need ever again fear snooping by bureaucrats, federal agents, or in-laws. The prominent iconoclast John Gilmore, who favors “law ʻnʼ chaos over law ʻnʼ order,” recently proclaimed that computers are literally extensions of our minds, and that their contents should therefore remain as private as our inner thoughts. Another activist, John Perry Barlow, published a widely discussed “Declaration of Independence for Cyberspace” proclaiming that the mundane jurisdictions of nations and their archaic laws are essentially powerless and irrelevant to the Internet and its denizens (or “netizens”). Among the loose clan of self-proclaimed “cypherpunks,” a central goal is that citizens should be armed with broad new powers to conceal their words, actions, and identities.

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At one extreme of this trend are those who demand legal recognition that individuals have a basic right of ownership over any and all data about themselves: no one should be able to use any fact or datum concerning you—not even your name—without your explicit permission. Supporting a quite different approach are some of the most vivid and original thinkers of the information age. John Gilmore, Esther Dyson, John Perry Barlow, and others on the (roughly) libertarian wing were in the vanguard fighting against both the Clipper proposal and the Communications Decency Act. Seeing little need or value in new laws, they hold that technology will be a key factor in defending liberty during the coming era. Fresh tools of encryption and electronic anonymity will protect individuals against intrusive spying by others, and especially by the state.

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In other words, we may not be able to eliminate the intrusive glare shining on citizens of the next century, but the glare just might be rendered harmless through the application of more light aimed in the other direction. Nor is Kelly alone in this opinion among cyber-era luminaries. Even some of the bright people I labeled earlier as “strong privacy advocates”—Esther Dyson and John Perry Barlow, for instance—have publicly mused that transparency might be preferable, if only it could somehow be made to work. Said Barlow: “I have no secrets myself, and I think that everybody would be a lot happier and safer if they just let everything be known. Then, nobody could use anything against them.

Masters of Deception: The Gang That Ruled Cyberspace
by Michelle Slatalla and Joshua Quittner
Published 15 Jan 1995

About forty guests log in from their homes and participate in an open-ended, freewheeling debate. They were an eclectic group, and among their number were Eli and Mark (uninvited) and a retired cattle rancher and lyricist for the Grateful Dead, John Perry Barlow. Given the amount of time they spent there, it was bound to happen that the boys and Barlow would cross paths online one day. But who could have imagined the repercussions? John Perry Barlow tells everyone he lives in Pinedale, Wyoming, but that's not really true. He actually lives in a much more isolated place, a place called Cora, pop. 4. Cora makes Pinedale look like Los Angeles. Barlow's grandfather founded Sublett County and built a cattle ranch next to 15, 000 acres of forest service land.

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But wait: Aren't Eli and Mark the subject of a major federal investigation? Wasn't thousands of dollars' worth of their computer equipment just confiscated? It would make sense to lay low. On the other hand, all the attention is a little overhwelming and it really doesn't feel like they're in big trouble. Instead, it feels like they'd just got discovered. John Perry Barlow has even recovered sufficiently from the mesmerizing appearance of his credit history on his computer screen to travel to New York, where he'd met Mark and Eli face-to-face. Well, actually, he'd been in town on some other business. An NBC producer wanted Barlow to defend the use of LSD on some TV news show segment, since Barlow had been, after all, the one who'd gotten the Grateful Dead to come to Millbrook in 1967 to hang out with Timothy Leary.

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Do you want to make the argument that these were just poor scientists, and the world was their laboratory? Then try explaining Julio and John taking money from Morty. Try explaining that phone call where Julio said to Mark, "I would, like, crash everything. " The facts trouble Mitch Kapor and John Perry Barlow, whose Electronic Frontier Foundation has been monitoring the progression of the MOD boys' case since the very beginning. They wonder whether the government has taken to picking on defenseless teenagers. One day in 1992, the EFF's staff lawyer (yes, there's a staff now, and an office in Cambridge) comes to New York City to investigate.

System Error: Where Big Tech Went Wrong and How We Can Reboot
by Rob Reich , Mehran Sahami and Jeremy M. Weinstein
Published 6 Sep 2021

The response was quick: “Democracy? No. To optimize for science, we need a beneficent technocrat in charge. Democracy is too slow, and it holds science back.” Chapter 2 The Problematic Marriage of Hackers and Venture Capitalists In 1996, at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, John Perry Barlow—a lyricist for the Grateful Dead, onetime cattle rancher, and a cofounder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation—penned “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace.” Reacting to the passage in the United States Telecommunications Act of 1996, Barlow channeled the techno-libertarian spirit, writing “Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind.

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Responding to growing calls for regulation, companies are pushing back through lobbying, public relations efforts to sway public opinion, and direct engagement with lawmakers to influence legislation. Not only have the engineers become the financiers, they are now trying to set the rules for how they are, or are not, regulated. It’s an incredible shift from the early days of counterculture hackers—people who might have chatted online with John Perry Barlow about the Grateful Dead at the Whole Earth ’Lectronic Link (WELL)—to those who now look to influence the political arena for the financial benefit of their companies. In 2008, the Illinois General Assembly passed the Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA), a pathbreaking piece of legislation that limits the collection and usage of biometric data, such as fingerprints and facial geometry (which can be inferred from photographs of individuals).

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As Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi put it, “Unwarranted, concentrated economic power in the hands of a few is dangerous to democracy—especially when digital platforms control content. The era of self-regulation is over.” That remains to be seen. Big tech will not submit to regulation without a fight. One outcome is clear: we are in a different land from the one in which John Perry Barlow hoped we might end up. Chapter 3 The Winner-Take-All Race Between Disruption and Democracy A few years ago, at another dinner in Silicon Valley, Reid Hoffman spoke freely as he offered his perspective on the growing public outrage at tech companies. If you are the CEO of a tech company, he said, your primary concern is your competitors.

Internet for the People: The Fight for Our Digital Future
by Ben Tarnoff
Published 13 Jun 2022

A body of glass, copper, silicon, and a thousand other things—things that have to be dug out of the earth and hammered into useful shapes, with significant inputs of labor and energy. Bodies are material; they are also historical. If the internet is not a place of pure spirit—a “civilization of the Mind,” as the cyberlibertarian John Perry Barlow once called it—neither is it a place untouched by the past. It is entangled with history, and often in quite literal ways. One way is infrastructural. Submarine cables like MAREA, writes the scholar Nicole Starosielski, frequently follow “the contours of earlier networks.” Installing underwater lines is expensive, and it’s safer to follow known paths than to pioneer new ones.

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In the 1990s, the idea of cyberspace as a realm beyond race and gender was everywhere. Television commercials of the time trafficked in it; so did prominent pundits. Bodies would be left behind, along with the differences that marked them and the injustices that attended those differences. “Ours is a world that is both everywhere and nowhere,” wrote the cyberlibertarian John Perry Barlow in 1996, “but it is not where bodies live.” Yet it was abundantly clear that the internet was indeed a place where bodies lived, though this clarity was mostly reserved for those who inhabited bodies that were not white and not male. Cyberspace was suffused with the bigotries that users brought with them.

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Through a well-organized offensive, right-wing activists have made social media into an accelerator for their politics. Indeed, the resurgence of the far Right, both in the US and around the world, is hard to imagine without this development. It was David Duke, former Ku Klux Klan grand wizard, and not John Perry Barlow, former Grateful Dead lyricist, who saw the future of the internet most clearly. But how has Duke’s vision been fulfilled, exactly? How do the online malls of social media politicize people? This is a matter of much complexity, and much confusion. Beyond the Bubble The popular version goes something like this: users are being brainwashed by disinformation.

Orwell Versus the Terrorists: A Digital Short
by Jamie Bartlett
Published 12 Feb 2015

Many of the net’s early advocates believed that, by enabling people to communicate more freely with each other, it would help to end misunderstanding and hatred. Nicholas Negroponte – former Director of the illustrious MIT Media Lab – declared in 1997 that the internet would bring about world peace, and the end of nationalism. For some, like John Perry Barlow, author of the Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, this new, free world could help to create just, humane and liberal societies – better than those ‘weary giants of flesh and steel’. None of them predicted the endless cat memes, or the inane holiday pictures, the Islamist propaganda, or child pornography networks.

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Many techno-optimists, such as the cheerleaders for the networked revolution Wired and Mondo 2000 magazines, believed cyberspace would herald a new dawn of learning and understanding, even the end of the national state. The best statement of this view was the American essayist and prominent cyberlibertarian John Perry Barlow’s 1996 ‘Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace’, which announced to the real world that ‘your legal concepts of property, expression, identity, movement, and context do not apply to us . . . our identities have no bodies, so, unlike you, we cannot obtain order by physical coercion.’ Barlow believed that the lack of censorship and the anonymity that the net seemed to offer would foster a freer, more open society, because people could cast off the tyranny of their fixed real-world identities and create themselves anew.

The System: Who Owns the Internet, and How It Owns Us
by James Ball
Published 19 Aug 2020

Cohn’s connection to EFF dates right back to 1990; she had studied human rights law through law school, and been interested in that field. By virtue of living in the Bay Area, she fell in with a crowd of people involved in the early internet, before the World Wide Web. These included John Gilmore, an early Sun Microsystems employee, and John Perry Barlow, perhaps best known as the lyricist for the Grateful Dead. Barlow, who died aged seventy in 2018,8 became known through the 1990s as something of an internet visionary, seeing its potential – but also its risks. ‘I honestly believe, without hyperbole, that the people in this room are doing things which will change the world more than anything since the capture of fire,’ he told a room of technologists in 1994.

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Their eyes just glaze over, yet all the people who they’re supporting all round the world who are trying to do this kind of work depend on it.’ Cohn, though, will stay optimistic. Her two and a half decades at the front lines of these online battles – which have only seen the stage get larger and the stakes get higher – have not dented the optimism she shared with John Perry Barlow and others in the 1990s. Just because the task ahead is a tough one doesn’t mean it’s a fight not worth having – especially if you keep the upsides of the internet in mind, something that can be easy to forget when daunted by the power and money arrayed against its promise. ‘I think that it is still the case that more people have a chance to reach a bigger audience through the digital networks than ever before in the history of mankind,’ Cohn says of the internet’s upside.

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From long before most of us cared about the internet, it was mired in regulatory battles – and where there are regulatory power battles, there is the potential for power grabs, and for profits. The new, online world built from the networks these cables facilitated was hardly unencumbered from the power players of the old world, though. When John Perry Barlow presented his declaration of the independence of cyberspace in 1996, he already knew it was an aspiration rather than a reality (much like the USA’s own declaration of independence when it was first signed). How could he not, given he had co-founded EFF six years previously to fight government seizure of online communications?

Dawn of the Code War: America's Battle Against Russia, China, and the Rising Global Cyber Threat
by John P. Carlin and Garrett M. Graff
Published 15 Oct 2018

Ibid., 173. 61. Ibid., 207. 62. Ibid., 223. 63. “Remembering Grateful Dead Lyricist and Internet Activist John Perry Barlow,” Fresh Air from NPR, February 9, 2018, www.npr.org/2018/02/09/584508647/remembering-grateful-dead-lyricist-and-internet-activist-john-perry-barlow. 64. “Cyber-Libertarian and Pioneer John Perry Barlow Dies at Age 70,” The Two-Way: Breaking News from NPR, February 7, 2018, www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2018/02/07/584124201/cyber-libertarian-and-pioneer-john-perry-barlow-dies-at-age-70. 65. Steve Schroeder, The Lure: The True Story of How the Department of Justice Brought Down Two of the World’s Most Dangerous Cyber Criminals (Course Technology PTR, 2011), 27. 66.

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We took that moment of hope in the 1990s for granted, as Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man made it appear that ideological struggles were over and democracy would reign supreme.* At the time, the rising digital world seemed to take freedom even one natural step further, allowing for a place that can be without rules and completely unfettered. The same year, 1996, that I worked at Freedom House, John Perry Barlow—a former lyricist for the Grateful Dead who been an early participant in the web—authored and posted online a “Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace,” writing, “Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone.

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“This kind of conduct will not be tolerated.”61 Journalists warned that the security problems ahead looked dire; the phone company systems and the online network, Tymnet, that the hackers had penetrated “look[ed] like a fortress” compared to the new World Wide Web, which had “virtually no security.”62 Through the 1990s, the Communications Decency Act—which tried to severely restrict “indecent” content online—and the Clipper chip debate—where the Clinton administration proposed outfitting computers with encryption that only the government could decode—sparked online uproars among those who felt the government was treading on the inherent freedom that online space provided. As I went through law school, I followed the debates and declarations from John Perry Barlow and others about defending the unique sovereignty of the online space. Barlow, who raised cattle in Wyoming, recalls awakening to the challenges of cyberspace when an FBI agent, Richard Baxter, showed up at his ranch asking about the “New Prosthesis League,” which was actually a hacking group known as Nu Prometheus League.

Free Ride
by Robert Levine
Published 25 Oct 2011

In a January 1996 Wired article about Lehman’s proposals, the legal scholar Pamela Samuelson wrote, “Lehman aims to be the sheriff who will kick those anarchic digital cowboys off the Net and make the electronic frontier safe for businesses that want to set up shop there.”18 But Samuelson didn’t note that the bill’s opponents also wanted to make the Internet safe for businesses—they just happened to be different businesses. Plenty of activists wanted information to be free so they’d have an easier time selling computers, Internet access, or online advertising. Some of the rhetoric was far more radical. In February 1996, the Grateful Dead lyricist turned digital activist John Perry Barlow published “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace.”19 Barlow was reacting to the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which had plenty of faults. But he came up with one of the more overblown manifestos in the history of the Internet, which is no small distinction: Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind.

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Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit to stay Patel’s injunction.26 As Boies shaped Napster’s defense, anticopyright activists weighed in separately to support the service. The free culture activist Lawrence Lessig, then teaching law at Stanford University, submitted an “expert report” to Judge Patel that argued Napster would have legitimate uses, even if they hadn’t emerged yet.27 John Perry Barlow, who had written “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace,” contributed a manifesto to Wired claiming that Judge Patel’s injunction had turned “millions of politically apathetic youngsters into electronic Hezbollah.”28 Barlow said he thought Napster should have been “Napster.org”—a nonprofit—even though everyone at the company but Shawn Fanning was motivated by monetary gain.29 In Barlow’s view, the future would involve voluntary payments to artists “without the barbaric inconvenience”—italics his—“currently imposed by the entertainment industry.”30 Other pundits simply decided the law didn’t matter.

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Not everyone wants that. On a fundamental level, some online activists and the companies that fund them are so attached to the idea of a perfectly open Internet that they won’t accept any action that protects the rights of creators. Remember that the Electronic Frontier Foundation was cofounded by John Perry Barlow, who told the governments of the world, “You have no sovereignty where we gather.”35 In May 2010, the organization made the very reasonable suggestion that creators need to stop suing individual copyright infringers.36 Then, a few months later, it objected to COICA on the grounds that it constituted censorship.

The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America
by Margaret O'Mara
Published 8 Jul 2019

I’ve got ideas all day long, I can’t control them, it’s like, they come charging in, I can’t even fight ’em off if I wanted to. Night Shift (1982)1 On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather. JOHN PERRY BARLOW, “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace,” 19962 The machine that is everywhere hailed as the very incarnation of the new had revealed itself to be not so new after all, but a series of skins, layer on layer, winding around the messy, evolving idea of the computing machine. ELLEN ULLMAN, Life in Code, 19983 CONTENTS Also by Margaret O’Mara Title Page Copyright Dedication Epigraph List of Abbreviations Introduction: The American Revolution ACT ONE: START UP Arrivals Chapter 1: Endless Frontier Chapter 2: Golden State Chapter 3: Shoot the Moon Chapter 4: Networked Chapter 5: The Money Men Arrivals Chapter 6: Boom and Bust ACT TWO: PRODUCT LAUNCH Arrivals Chapter 7: The Olympics of Capitalism Chapter 8: Power to the People Chapter 9: The Personal Machine Chapter 10: Homebrewed Chapter 11: Unforgettable Chapter 12: Risky Business ACT THREE: GO PUBLIC Arrivals Chapter 13: Storytellers Chapter 14: California Dreaming Chapter 15: Made in Japan Chapter 16: Big Brother Chapter 17: War Games Chapter 18: Built on Sand ACT FOUR: CHANGE THE WORLD Arrivals Chapter 19: Information Means Empowerment Chapter 20: Suits in the Valley Chapter 21: Magna Carta Chapter 22: Don’t Be Evil Arrivals Chapter 23: The Internet Is You Chapter 24: Software Eats the World Chapter 25: Masters of the Universe Departure: Into the Driverless Car Photographs Acknowledgments Note on Sources Notes Image Credits Index About the Author LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS ACM: Association for Computing Machinery AEA: American Electronics Association AI: Artificial intelligence AMD: Advanced Micro Devices ARD: American Research and Development ARM: Advanced reduced-instruction-set microprocessor ARPA: Advanced Research Projects Agency, Department of Defense, renamed DARPA AWS: Amazon Web Services BBS: Bulletin Board Services CDA: Communications Decency Act of 1996 CPSR: Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility CPU: Central processing unit EDS: Electronic Data Systems EFF: Electronic Frontier Foundation EIT: Enterprise Integration Technologies ENIAC: Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer ERISA: Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974 FASB: Financial Accounting Standards Board FCC: Federal Communications Commission FTC: Federal Trade Commission GUI: Graphical user interface HTML: Hypertext markup language IC: Integrated circuit IPO: Initial public offering MIS: Management information systems MITI: Ministry of International Trade and Industry (of Japan) NACA: National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, later superseded by NASA NASA: National Aeronautics and Space Administration NASD: National Association of Securities Dealers NDEA: National Defense Education Act NII: National Information Infrastructure NSF: National Science Foundation NVCA: National Venture Capital Association OS: Operating system OSRD: U.S.

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In 1985 came the most famous of the early BBSs: The WELL, or Whole Earth ’Lectronic Link, started by Stewart Brand and his merry band of hackers up in Marin County. The WELL’s fame came from the Silicon Valley celebrities who made it their first online hangout, including Grateful Dead lyricist John Perry Barlow, journalist Steven Levy, Lotus founder Mitch Kapor, and of course Brand himself. The bland Ohioans running CompuServe (now owned by even blander tax preparer H&R Block) couldn’t compete with The WELL’s glamour and dash. The WELL’s pedigree was decidedly countercultural, as it hired a clutch of its founding staff from the legendary Tennessee commune The Farm, and devoted considerable discussion-thread and file-swapping bandwidth to the Dead.

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Operation Sun Devil suddenly made him realize how vulnerable any chat room could be to government snoops. “This could have been me,” he realized.4 Flush with many millions from selling his Lotus stock, Kapor established a legal defense fund for the accused hackers and began raising money among his friends. One contributor was fellow WELL denizen John Perry Barlow, for whom the raid had prompted flashbacks to the 1960s and a government that was “a thing of monolithic and evil efficiency.” By summer’s end, Kapor, Barlow, and several other tech-industry insiders went even further, establishing a new group to fight government threats to the free flow of computerized information, and to establish some new rules for a medium that defied so many of the old ones.

WikiLeaks and the Age of Transparency
by Micah L. Sifry
Published 19 Feb 2011

Activists affiliated with the online collective “Anonymous” organized powerful counterattacks, 37 WIKILEAKS AND THE AGE OF TRANSPARENCY showering the websites of Amazon, PayPal, MasterCard, and others they perceived to be WikiLeaks’ antagonists with “distributed denial-of-service” attacks, essentially paralyzing them with tens of thousands of coordinated web page requests per second. No one knew who or what was in charge of Anonymous, but we could see its members working via anonymous Internet chat rooms and collaborative writing tools. Hailing the emergence of this resistance, the cyberlibertarian activist John Perry Barlow wrote on his Twitter feed: “The first serious infowar is now engaged. The field of battle is WikiLeaks. You are the troops.” 38 MICAH L. SIFRY 2 The Beginning of the Age of Networked Politics Imagine for a moment: millions of people sitting in their shuttered homes at night, bathed in that ghostly blue television aura.

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Let’s say that everything stays ninety-nine percent the same, that people watch ninety-nine percent as much television as they used to, but one percent of that is carved out for producing and for sharing. The Internet-connected population watches roughly a trillion hours of TV a year. That’s about five times the size of the annual U.S. consumption. One percent of that is one hundred Wikipedia projects per year worth of participation.19 John Perry Barlow’s infowar has begun in earnest, because a significant portion of the population that is leaning forward and choosing to produce and share information—a piece of this gigantic cognitive surplus, if you will—has decided that we would like to know what is actually going on. 63 WIKILEAKS AND THE AGE OF TRANSPARENCY 4 Kicking Down the Door to the Smoke-Filled Room Transparency is the new objectivity.

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DDOS is a powerful new tool for harassing one’s adversaries online, and some political activists have argued that as it doesn’t cause any permanent damage, it should be considered a new form of online civil disobedience, like a digital sit-in.25 However, it’s hard to see how you can protest the suppression of online speech by suppressing someone else’s online speech. Personally, I agree with cyber-libertarian John Perry Barlow, who called DDOS the “poison gas” of online activism.26 As a tool, it may do more harm than good, as the kinds of entities that are least able to defend themselves from a concerted denial of service attack tend to be small, independent human rights and dissident groups.27 They can seek refuge by migrating their services to corporate platforms, like Google’s Blogger.

Lurking: How a Person Became a User
by Joanne McNeil
Published 25 Feb 2020

The façade of weightless expression of identity against the mechanics of data capture and surveillance created ideological fractures among the internet’s most involved netizens. Fred Turner, in his classic From Counterculture to Cyberculture, recounts a revealing exchange that happened in an online conference on The WELL in 1989, in collaboration with 2600 and Harper’s magazines. One of the panelists, John Perry Barlow—a founding member of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and, before that, a lyricist for the Grateful Dead—had the best intentions but a hopelessly optimistic idea of the internet. It was a communal town square, the Wild West, a democratizing change agent, notions that he would synthesize in his influential text from 1996, “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace,” which claims freedom as a central and untrammeled tenet of the internet experience.

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* * * Long one of the top ten most-visited websites, Wikipedia differs widely from all other major internet players because its content is collectively vetted and not monetized. Founded in 2001, its business model and editorial strategy seem like nineties cyberspace holdovers, inheriting that generation’s optimism along with its blind spots. It carries the torch of John Perry Barlow’s principles in “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace,” and in addition to what it is not, Wikipedia isn’t anticapitalist. The founder, Jimmy Wales, like many cyber-utopians, was a libertarian (albeit his Twitter feed now suggests that, like a lot of libertarians in the Clinton years, he’s since moved to the left).

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Even in later years, hardly anyone has set their film or fiction in this time period and scene (notable exception: Thomas Pynchon’s Bleeding Edge, 2013). Until then, we might look to nineties San Francisco for West Coast context, including Lynn Hershman Leeson, who made the film Conceiving Ada, about a computer artist making a CD-ROM, which starred Tilda Swinton as Ada Lovelace and included appearances by John Perry Barlow, Bruce Sterling, and Timothy Leary. That same year—1997—Ellen Ullman’s Close to the Machine (City Lights) was published, recounting her work as a computer engineer. I wrote about the camgirl art movement in the 2014 book Art and the Internet (Black Dog Publishing, 2014, 18–23). Jennifer Ringley reported that JenniCam received 100 million page views a week, but that was self-reported, and Theresa M.

Digital Disconnect: How Capitalism Is Turning the Internet Against Democracy
by Robert W. McChesney
Published 5 Mar 2013

Lewis Hyde, Common as Air: Revolution, Art, and Ownership (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2010), 199–206. 57. Don Clark, “Facing Early Losses, Some Web Publishers Begin to Pull the Plug,” Wall Street Journal, Jan. 14, 1997, A8. 58. Cited in Joseph Turow, The Daily You (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011), 15. 59. J.D. Lasica, “John Perry Barlow: ‘People Want to Bypass the Mass Media,’” May 24, 1996, www.jdlasica.com/1996/05/24/john-perry-barlow-people-want-to-bypass-the-mass-media. 60. Michael Mandiberg, introduction, in Michael Mandiberg, ed., The Social Media Reader (New York: New York University Press, 2012), 1. 61. See, for example, Clifford G. Christians, Theodore L. Glasser, Denis Mc-Quail, Kaarle Nordenstreng, and Robert A.

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“We are talking about a field,” one commercial website producer lamented in 1997, “where it’s not even clear who should pay whom.”57 This led in the 1990s to an initial deluge of euphoria from those who found the corporate media status quo unsatisfactory. “The world has suddenly developed a printing press for every person on the planet,” Henry Jenkins enthused.58 The media conglomerates, in their wheeling and dealing, were simply engaging in the “rearrangement of deck chairs on the Titanic,” as Grateful Dead lyricist John Perry Barlow of the Electronic Freedom Foundation famously put it. The infinitude of websites and the ability of anyone to go toe to toe with Rupert Murdoch was their death knell: “I think they are, in their present manifestations, goners.”59 Scarcity, a requirement for capitalist markets, no longer existed!

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The giant media firms have not disappeared, nor has the Internet eliminated television and Hollywood. Marketing is a mandatory core institution of contemporary capitalism; the $300 billion spent annually on advertising and sales promotion was not about to go gentle into that good night when John Perry Barlow fired up his bong and showed it the door. These are extremely powerful institutions with tremendous political and economic power; they have flexed it mightily and with great effect. But their world was being turned upside down, and the emergence of social media only underscored their dilemma.

The Filter Bubble: What the Internet Is Hiding From You
by Eli Pariser
Published 11 May 2011

It’s hard to imagine a more dramatic departure from the early days of the Internet, in which not exposing your identity was part of the appeal. In chat rooms and online forums, your gender, race, age, and location were whatever you said they were, and the denizens of these spaces exulted about the way the medium allowed you to shed your skin. Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) founder John Perry Barlow dreamed of “creating a world that all may enter without privilege or prejudice accorded by race, economic power, military force, or station of birth.” The freedom that this offered anyone who was interested to transgress and explore, to try on different personas for size, felt revolutionary.

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pagewanted=all. 17 “smaller and smaller and faster and faster”: Thomas Friedman, The Lexus and the Olive Tree (New York: Random House, 2000), 141. 18 “closes the loop on pecuniary self-interest”: Clive Thompson, interview with author, Brooklyn, NY, Aug. 13, 2010. 18 “Customers are always right, but people aren’t”: Lee Siegel, Against the Machine: Being Human in the Age of the Electronic Mob (New York: Spiegel and Grau, 2008), 161. 18 thirty-six hours a week watching TV: “Americans Using TV and Internet Together 35% More Than A Year Ago,” Nielsen Wire, Mar. 22, 2010, accessed Dec. 19, 2010, http://blog.nielsen.com/nielsenwire/online_mobile/three-screen-report-q409. 19 “civilization of Mind in cyberspace”: John Perry Barlow, “A Cyberspace Independence Declaration,” Feb. 9, 1996, accessed Dec. 19, 2010, http://w2.eff.org/Censorship/Internet_censorship_bills/barlow_0296.declaration. 19 “code is law”: Lawrence Lessig, Code 2.0 (New York: Basic Books, 2006), 5. Chapter One: The Race for Relevance 21 “If you’re not paying for something”: MetaFilter blog, accessed Dec. 10, 2010, www.metafilter.com/95152/Userdriven-discontent. 22 “vary sex, violence, and political leaning”: Nicholas Negroponte, Being Digital (New York: Knopf, 1995), 46. 22 “the Daily Me”: Ibid., 151. 22 “Intelligent agents are the unequivocal future”: Negroponte, Mar. 1, 1995, e-mail to the editor, Wired.com, Mar. 3, 1995, www.wired.com/wired/archive/3.03/negroponte.html. 23 “The agent question looms”: Jaron Lanier, “Agents of Alienation,” accessed Jan. 30, 2011, www.jaronlanier.com/agentalien.html 24 twenty-five worst tech products: Dan Tynan, “The 25 Worst Tech Products of All Time,” PC World, May 26, 2006, accessed Dec. 10, 2010, www.pcworld.com/article/125772-3/the_25_worst_tech_products_of_all_time.html#bob. 24 invested over $100 million: Dawn Kawamoto, “Newsmaker: Riding the next technology wave,” CNET News, Oct. 2, 2003, accessed Jan. 30, 2011, http://news.cnet.com/2008-7351-5085423.html. 25 “he’s a lot like John Irving”: Robert Spector, Get Big Fast (New York: HarperBusiness, 2000), 142. 25 “small Artificial Intelligence company”: Ibid., 145. 26 surprised to find them at the top: Ibid., 27. 26 Random House, controlled only 10 percent: Ibid., 25. 26 so many of them—3 million active titles: Ibid., 25. 27 They called their field “cybernetics”: Barnabas D.

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Chapter Four: The You Loop 109 “what a personal computer really is”: Sharon Gaudin, “Total Recall: Storing Every Life Memory in a Surrogate Brain,” ComputerWorld, Aug. 2, 2008, accessed Dec. 15, 2010, www.computerworld.com/s/article/9074439/Total_Recall_Storing_every_life_memory_in_a_surrogate_brain. 109 “You have one identity”: David Kirkpatrick, The Facebook Effect: The Inside Story of the Company That Is Connecting the World (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2010), 199. 109 “I behave a different way”: “Live-Blog: Zuckerberg and David Kirkpatrick on the Facebook Effect,” transcript of interview, Social Beat, accessed Dec. 15, 2010, http://venturebeat.com/2010/07/21/live-blog-zuckerberg-and-david-kirkpatrick-on-the-facebook-effect. 110 “Same awkward self”: Ibid. 110 that would be the norm: Marshall Kirkpatrick, “Facebook Exec: All Media Will Be Personalized in 3 to 5 Years,” ReadWriteWeb, Sept. 29, 2010, accessed Dec. 15, 2010, www.readwriteweb.com/archives/facebook_exec_all_media_will_be_personalized_in_3.php. 110 “a world that all may enter”: John Perry Barlow, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Feb. 8, 1996, accessed Dec. 15, 2010, https://projects.eff.org/~barlow/Declaration-Final.html. 111 pseudonym with the real name: Julia Angwin and Steve Stecklow, “‘Scrapers’ Dig Deep for Data on Web,” Wall Street Journal, Oct. 12, 2010, accessed Dec. 15, 2010, http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703358504575544381288117888.html. 111 tied to the individual people who use them: Julia Angwin and Jennifer Valentino-Devries, “Race Is On to ‘Fingerprint’ Phones, PCs,” Wall Street Journal, Nov. 30, 2010, accessed Jan. 30, 2011, http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704679204575646704100959546.html?

The Curse of Bigness: Antitrust in the New Gilded Age
by Tim Wu
Published 14 Jun 2018

What else could one conclude when, in the 2000s, a tiny blog could outdo an established media outlet? When startups seemed to come from nowhere, gain millions of users overnight, and make their founders and employees wealthier than the old school tycoons? The man who described the mood was author John Perry Barlow, who in the 1990s implored those interested in cyberspace to “imagine a place where trespassers leave no footprints, where goods can be stolen an infinite number of times and yet remain in the possession of their original owners, where businesses you never heard of can own the history of your personal affairs, where only children feel completely at home, where the physics is that of thought rather than things, and where everyone is as virtual as the shadows in Plato’s cave.”

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Gustavo Grullon et al. (2015), available at http://finance.eller.arizona.edu/sites/finance/files/grullon_11.4.16.pdf. 115 studies by the Council of Economic Advisors: “Benefits of Competition and Indicators of Market Power,” Council of Economic Advisors Issue Brief (2016), available at https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/sites/default/files/page/files/20160414_cea_competition_issue_brief.pdf. 115 an independent study by the Economist: “Corporate Concentration,” The Economist, March 24, 2016. 115 The OECD, in its own: “Market Concentration,” OECD Issues paper by the Secretariat (2018), available at https://one.oecd.org/document/DAF/COMP/WD(2018)46/en/pdf. 117 “an antitrust division in the Justice Department”: Barack Obama (speech, Oregon, May 18, 2008), Reuters. CHAPTER SEVEN 119 “imagine a place where trespassers leave no footprints”: “Electronic Frontier: Coming Into the Country,” John Perry Barlow, Communications of the ACM, January 1991. 122 Instagram “allows people to do what they like to do on Facebook”: “Instagram Was Facebook’s Biggest Threat,”Nicholas Carlson, Business Insider, April 9, 2012. 122 “Buying Instagram conveyed to investors”: “Here’s Proof that Instagram Was One of the Smartest Acquisitions Ever,” Victor Luckerson, TIME, April 19, 2016. 124 “the most popular messaging app”: “A Year Later, $19 Billion for WhatsApp Doesn’t Sound So Crazy,” Josh Constine, TechCrunch, Feb. 19, 2015. 124 “Without this acquisition”: “Facebook’s WhatsApp Acquisition Exposes Grave Risks to the Business Model,” Seeking Alpha, Feb. 20, 2014. 126 “monopoly profits”: “Competition Is for Losers,” Peter Thiel, Wall Street Journal, Sept. 12, 2014. 126 “bringing the world closer together”: “Facebook Careers,” Facebook. 126 “different kind of company”: “Facebook Careers,” various job postings, Facebook.

The Great Firewall of China
by James Griffiths;
Published 15 Jan 2018

Jarnow, Heads: a biography of psychedelic America, Cambridge MA: Da Capo Press, 2016. 19K. Drum, ‘A profile of Dick Cheney’, Washington Monthly, 9 November 2003, https://washingtonmonthly.com/2003/11/09/a-profile-of-dick-cheney/ 20J. Barlow, ‘Lyrics by John Perry Barlow’, Electronic Frontier Foundation, 1990, https://web.archive.org/web/20180208000604/https://w2.eff.org/Misc/Publications/John_Perry_Barlow/HTML/barlows_lyrics.html 21Goldsmith and Wu, Who Controls the Internet?, p. 17. 22J. Barlow, ‘The economy of ideas’, Wired, 1 March 1994, https://www.wired.com/1994/03/economy-ideas/ 23J. Barlow, ‘Decrypting the puzzle palace’, Communications of the ACM, July 1992, http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/classes/6.805/articles/digital-telephony/Barlow_decrypting_puzzle_palace.html 24Goldsmith and Wu, Who Controls the Internet?

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The Github incident was for many outside China the first hint they had of the ideology behind this resurgence in censorship, one that would come to define how China views the web both at home and globally: the doctrine of cyber-sovereignty. * It wasn’t supposed to end up like this. The early evangelists of the internet preached absolute freedom from government control. The web, they said, would route around censorship, making it the ultimate Pandora’s box for repressive regimes. As the late cyberlibertarian John Perry Barlow wrote: Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather. We have no elected government, nor are we likely to have one, so I address you with no greater authority than that with which liberty itself always speaks.

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As academics Tim Wu and Jack Goldsmith write, in the 1990s, “[I]t was widely believed that cyberspace might challenge the authority of nation-states and move the world to a new post-territorial system.”17 That system would be governed not by law, but by code. * One of the leading advocates of a cyber utopia free from nation states and their laws was John Perry Barlow, perhaps the weirdest and most unlikely of the many eccentrics and free thinkers active in the early days of the internet. Barlow was born in Wyoming in 1947 to a well-off family of devout Mormons; when he was growing up, the only TV he was allowed to watch was religious programming, and even that wasn’t until he turned eleven.18 John’s father, Norman Barlow, was a Republican state legislator, and John himself later ran Dick Cheney’s first congressional campaign,19 before eventually breaking with the Republican Party after it was taken over by Cheney’s very own brand of foreign interventionism and neoconservatism.

The End of Big: How the Internet Makes David the New Goliath
by Nicco Mele
Published 14 Apr 2013

The following year, Congress passed the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which deregulated the radio spectrum, allowing, among other things, the rise of huge media conglomerates like Clear Channel (paradoxical, I know). The underlying philosophy received memorable expression in a piece written by the technologist, cattle rancher, and Grateful Dead lyricist John Perry Barlow called “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace.” The piece begins, “Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us.

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But we also need to steer clear of solutions that, although alluring on their surface, apply the basic thinking of the techno-nerds who brought us radical connectivity. In chapter 1, I explained how nerd history carries an implicit critique of institutions and an empowerment of the individual. John Perry Barlow’s manifesto (“Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.”34) is a reminder of the radical mind-set that helped create our current moment in technology and of its potential relevance to government.

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I’ve met him, even spent some time with him, and he is an honest, genuine man working hard to do good. Yet I’m concerned with the ideological, anti-institutional thread running through connective technology, from Ted Nelson’s “Computer Lib” in the ’70s, to Steve Jobs’s literal and metaphorical 1984, to John Perry Barlow’s declaration of independence in the ’90s, up to Craigslist today. What if government adopted Craigslist’s core philosophies? True to the Craigslist ethos, customer service would be paramount. Newmark famously talks about himself as nothing more than a customer service representative. But this hands-off ethos got Craigslist into trouble as it became the primary online marketplace for prostitution and paid sex—a part of the explosion of the trafficking of women and children across borders that has skyrocketed over the last decade.37 It’s one of the downsides of the hands-off ideology that Craigslist adheres to.

This Machine Kills Secrets: Julian Assange, the Cypherpunks, and Their Fight to Empower Whistleblowers
by Andy Greenberg
Published 12 Sep 2012

And when the attacks on WikiLeaks began in December 2010, it was Anonymous that attacked back. The requisite manifesto broadcast through the Internet’s message board and blogs called for an action titled “Operation Avenge Assange.” It appeared shortly after PayPal cut off transfers to the group and quoted John Perry Barlow, a founder of the cypherpunk-affiliated Electronic Frontier Foundation: “The first serious infowar is now engaged. The field of battle is WikiLeaks. You are the troops.” The poster went on to call for boycotts and cyberattacks, mass distribution of the cables online and off, and even a letter-writing campaign to government officials in support of Assange.

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After that first installment in the series, Yordanov learned that someone in Burgas was trying a different censorship tactic, purchasing every issue of the paper from the distributor before it could be delivered to newsstands. When the next issue came out, he drove to the distributor early in the morning, filled his car with papers, and handed them out himself to local retailers. Yordanov’s brazenness didn’t go unnoticed. It would nearly cost him his life. If John Perry Barlow ever wrote a résumé—and he’s probably not the type who ever has—it would list seventeen years of cattle ranching in Wyoming, a few decades of writing lyrics for the Grateful Dead, experimenting with LSD alongside Timothy Leary, and cofounding the Electronic Frontier Foundation. But science fiction author Bruce Sterling once named Barlow’s primary profession as that of a poet, in the sense that Percy Shelley once described poets: “the unacknowledged legislators of the world.”

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Better to go after a public figure and bring attention to the problem than let the cherry-picking of private individuals’ data by the American government continue in secret, she says. Even so, the legal threats that have obtained her private data and prevented Jónsdóttir from traveling to the United States since the investigation began represent a problem for IMMI too. The Internet doesn’t reside in some abstract “cyberspace” of John Perry Barlow’s gospel and Tim May’s sci-fi imagining. Much of it, like Jónsdóttir’s Twitter data, resides in the United States. And until it physically moves to Iceland, it won’t be protected by IMMI’s laws. As legal blogger Arthur Bright pointed out when IMMI first surfaced, a media or technology company would have to relocate all of its staff and assets to Iceland or face the reality that its people and property back at home would be subject to the same archaic media laws as always.

Surveillance Valley: The Rise of the Military-Digital Complex
by Yasha Levine
Published 6 Feb 2018

Its faith that the Internet constituted a revolution in human affairs legitimated calls for telecommunications deregulation and the dismantling of government entitlement programs elsewhere as well,” remarks Fred Turner in From Counterculture to Cyberculture while examining Wired’s place in the deregulatory and privatization frenzy of the 1990s. 106. John Perry Barlow, “Jack In, Young Pioneer!” (keynote essay for the 1994 Computerworld College Edition, August 11, 1994), https://w2.eff.org/Misc /Publications/John_Perry_Barlow/HTML/jack_in_young_pioneer.html. 107. “Louis Rossetto,” Charlie Rose, season 1996, episode 01.24.96 (Arlington, VA: PBS, January 24, 1996). 108. Brand, “SPACEWAR.” Chapter 5 1. The story of Sergey Brin’s search for terrorists in Google’s logs comes from I’m Feeling Lucky: The Confessions of Google Employee Number 59, an amazing insider account by former Google employee Douglas Edwards.

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Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron, “The Californian Ideology,” Mute Magazine, September 1995, http://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/californian-ideology. 102. The Electronic Frontier Foundation was founded by Lotus Notes creator Mitch Kapor, cattle rancher and Grateful Dead songwriter John Perry Barlow, and early Sun Microsystems employee John Gilmore. It started out with a vague mission: to defend people’s civil liberties on the Internet and to “find a way of preserving the ideology of the 1960s” in the digital era. From its first days, EFF had deep pockets and featured an impressive roster: Stewart Brand and Apple’s Steve Wozniak were board members, while press outreach was conducted by Cathy Cook, who had done public relations for Steve Jobs.

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Discussion on Anonymizer’s intelligence work comes from leaked emails of another intelligence contractor, HBGary, which was hacked by Anonymous (Aaron Barr, “Re: this guy’s program is blown?” email message, July 1, 2010, https://surveillancevalley.com/content/citations/aaron-barr-aaron%40hbgary.com-re-this-guy-s-program-is-blown-1-july-2010.pdf). 24. John Perry Barlow, “Why Spy?” Forbes.com, October 7, 2002, https://www.forbes.com/asap/2002/1007/042.html. 25. A 2005 Wired profile of Tor and Roger Dingledine written by Kim Zetter offered a perfect example of how Tor’s military origins and funding were treated in those early years. Although the article discussed Tor’s origins as a US Navy project designed to hide spies online, it made no mention of Tor’s ongoing military funding and painted Dingledine and his partner Mathewson as independent programmers who had taken a half-baked technology, rebuilt it independently, and released it into the wild.

The Internet Trap: How the Digital Economy Builds Monopolies and Undermines Democracy
by Matthew Hindman
Published 24 Sep 2018

Media competition and coexistence: the theory of the niche. New York: Routledge. Dixit, A. K., and Stiglitz, J. E. (1977). Monopolistic competition and optimum product diversity. American Economic Review, 67 (3), 297–308. Doherty, B. (2004, August). John Perry Barlow 2.0. Reason. Retrieved from https://reason .com/archives/2004/08/01/john-perry-barlow-20. Downs, A. (1957). An economic theory of democracy. New York: Harper. Dyson, F. (2004). A meeting with Enrico Fermi. Nature, 427, 297. Earl, J., and Kimport, K. (2011). Digitally enabled social change: activism in the Internet age. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

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Growing the digital newspaper audience is still possible—but we need to hurry. 8 The “Nature” of the Internet The best products don’t win. The ones everyone use[s] win. I know a lot of people don’t want to hear this. . . . But make no mistake, growth tactics are how we got here. —Facebook Vice President Andrew Bosworth, internal memo titled “The Ugly,” June 18, 2016 In February 1996 John Perry Barlow, best known as a lyricist for the Grateful Dead, published a short manifesto titled “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace.” In turgid prose that recalled Hegel more than Jefferson, Barlow asserted that the internet was immune to regulation and entirely divorced from the “Industrial World.”1 The internet was “the new home of Mind,” where “whatever the human mind may create can be reproduced and distributed infinitely at no cost.

The Future of the Internet: And How to Stop It
by Jonathan Zittrain
Published 27 May 2009

But with the right tools, users can also see themselves as participants in the shaping of generative space—as netizens. This is a crucial reconception of what it means to go online. The currency of cyberspace is, after all, ideas, and we shortchange ourselves if we think of ideas to be, in the words of Electronic Frontier Foundation co-founder John Perry Barlow, merely “another industrial product, no more noble than pig iron,”14 broadcast to us for our consumption but not capable of also being shaped by us. If we insist on treating the Net as an invisible conduit, capable of greater or lesser bandwidth but otherwise meant to be invisible, we naturally turn to service providers with demands to keep it working, even when the problems arising are social in nature.

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REV. 229, 280 (1998) (“[P]erfect enforcement is rarely the optimal level of enforcement.”). 44. See David R. Johnson & David G. Post, Law and Borders—The Rise of Law in Cyberspace, 48 STAN. L. REV. 1367, 1367, 1383, 1387—88 (1996) (arguing that self-governance can and should be central to cyberspace regulation); John Perry Barlow, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace (Feb. 8, 1996), http://homes.eff.org/~barlow/Declaration-Final.html (“Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone.

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See, e.g., Clifford Shearing & Jennifer Wood, Governing Security for Common Goods, 31 INT. J. SOC. L. 205 (2003). However, there are criticisms of such community initiatives. In this view, there need to be structures in place to protect minority views within the communities, otherwise their rights can be trampled. 14. John Perry Barlow, A Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace (Feb. 8, 1996), http://homes.eff.org/-barlow/Declaration-Final.html. 15. See, e.g., Kevin R. Pinkney, Putting Blame Where Blame Is Due: Software Manufacturer and Customer Liability for Security-Related Software Failure, 13 ALB. L.J. SCI. & TECH. 43, 46 (2002) (arguing that software makers should be liable for exploited security vulnerabilities). 16.

Consumed: How Markets Corrupt Children, Infantilize Adults, and Swallow Citizens Whole
by Benjamin R. Barber
Published 1 Jan 2007

Still more recently, they were the pioneers of the electronic and digital revolution, Silicon Valley cowboys who made the imaginative leaps and took the risks in the 1960s and 1970s that allowed the consolidators and businessmen who established the monopolies and made the fortunes in the 1980s and 1990s to flourish. These were not the Bill Gateses of the cyberworld, but people like novelist William Gibson, John Perry Barlow (who wrote lyrics for the Grateful Dead), and the great cyber-pioneer Norbert Wiener. There is perhaps no better American model of this precapitalist swash-buckler archetype than John D. Rockefeller’s father. On his way to depicting the life of John D., biographer Ron Chernow offers a sidebar portrait of William Rockefeller that captures America’s precapitalist prelude right after the Civil War and immediately before the great capitalist breakout that would be called the Gilded Age.

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In this sense, early capitalist economies resemble the digital economy of the 1990s where technological ingenuity and invention outran by far the potential need for what was being engineered, leading to a boom-bust cycle still being played out. If (see below) Bill Gates plays Rockefeller to information capitalism’s golden age, crazies, prophets, and adventurers like William Gibson and John Perry Barlow are, as I have already suggested, its digital wildcatters and electronic swashbucklers. If each epoch in capitalism’s evolving story is represented by a civic prototype, the period of prelude can be said to feature an anticivic prototype—the outlaw innocent, the romantic anarchist. His values are radical individualist, often anarchistic, displaying an obliviousness to if not a disdain for conventions and mores.

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It was a field with pioneers aplenty, a plethora of brilliant people with ingenious ideas going all the way back to the father of modern cybernetics, Norbert Wiener of MIT. There were mathematicians like John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz, who invented BASIC but never managed to commercialize their work, as well as other visionaries who either lacked the technical expertise (William Gibson or John Perry Barlow, for example), or creators like Ed Roberts, the inventor of the Altair 8800, whose careers floundered as their fledging companies were bought up before the big money was made. The creator of the Cray Supercomputers, Seymour Cray, built what many people regarded as the best computers in the world, only to see his company go under and his own personal fortune vanish.

The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future
by Kevin Kelly
Published 6 Jun 2016

When masses of people who own the means of production work toward a common goal and share their products in common, when they contribute labor without wages and enjoy the fruits free of charge, it’s not unreasonable to call that new socialism. What they have in common is the verb “to share.” In fact, some futurists have called this economic aspect of the new socialism the “sharing economy” because the primary currency in this realm is sharing. • • • In the late 1990s, activist, provocateur, and aging hippy John Perry Barlow began calling this drift, somewhat tongue in cheek, “dot-communism.” He defined dot-communism as a “workforce composed entirely of free agents,” a decentralized gift or barter economy without money where there is no ownership of property and where technological architecture defines the political space.

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tracks nearly 150 wiki engines today: “Wiki Engines,” accessed June 24, 2015, http://goo.gl/5auMv6. billion instances of Creative Commons: “State of the Commons,” Creative Commons, accessed May 2, 2015. “dot-communism”: Theta Pavis, “The Rise of Dot-Communism,” Wired, October 25, 1999. “composed entirely of free agents”: Roshni Jayakar, “Interview: John Perry Barlow, Founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation,” Business Today, December 6, 2000, accessed July 30, 2015, via Internet Archive, April 24, 2006. ranked by the increasing degree of coordination: Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations (New York: Penguin Press, 2008). 1.8 billion per day: Mary Meeker, “Internet Trends 2014—Code Conference,” Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, 2014.

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“as smart as everyone”: Larry Keeley, “Ten Commandments for Success on the Net,” Fast Company, June 30, 1996. as Clay Shirky puts it: Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations (New York: Penguin Press, 2008). “Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace”: John Perry Barlow, “Declaring Independence,” Wired 4(6), June 1996. $24 billion in 2015: Steven Perlberg, “Social Media Ad Spending to Hit $24 Billion This Year,” Wall Street Journal, April 15, 2015. tried to harness readers’ reports: Rachel McAthy, “Lessons from the Guardian’s Open Newslist Trial,” Journalism.co.uk, July 9, 2012.

Move Fast and Break Things: How Facebook, Google, and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy
by Jonathan Taplin
Published 17 Apr 2017

The notion of the “hacker ethic” became a contested trope. It started with an online forum on the WELL organized by Harper’s Magazine. The subject was hacking, and Paul Tough, a Harper’s editor, had recruited Brand and a few of his most important WELL members, including Howard Rheingold, Kevin Kelly, and John Perry Barlow, to participate. Barlow, a shaggy, bearded man with a fondness for colorful cowboy shirts, is a true American character. He is a failed Wyoming rancher, a former Catholic mystic, and a former Grateful Dead lyricist. He was also an early proponent of cyberspace as the new American frontier—as lawless as Wyatt Earp’s Tombstone.

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The online security firm Cloudflare reported that “94% of requests that we see across the Tor network are per se malicious.” Like the Internet itself, the onion router was originally developed with funds from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) for the purpose of protecting US intelligence communications. Subsequently, funding for Tor came in part from John Perry Barlow’s Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), the organization willing to defend the darkest conduct on the Web in the name of free speech. When University of Portsmouth computer science researcher Gareth Owen began a study of the Dark Web, he assumed it was mainly a place for political activism and anonymous whistle-blowing—the very activities EFF said it was supporting.

Dawn of the New Everything: Encounters With Reality and Virtual Reality
by Jaron Lanier
Published 21 Nov 2017

Toward the end of my tenure, VPL got big enough that I no longer knew everyone. We outgrew our cute marina. (If you live in Silicon Valley, you know that tall building to the south of where the San Mateo Bridge alights on the peninsula? The one with the big octagonal window at the top? That was us.) Mr. John Perry Barlow, who prides himself on having radar for fascinating women, would tell me about interesting women who worked there whom I never met. A single lass who looked like Audrey Hepburn and descended from Albert Camus? Maybe she was there, who knows? I didn’t just encounter new people, but new versions of myself at VPL.

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Meanwhile, norms for tech journalism became hell-bent on positivity. VR engaged a new generation of journalists, like Steven Levy, Howard Rheingold, Luc Sante, and Mondo 2000’s Ken Goffman, aka R. U. Sirius. I’ll highlight two figures who were particularly influential as well as dear to me: Kevin Kelly and John Perry Barlow. Kevin is a fine example of a trusted friend with whom I disagree completely. When I met him, he was editing and writing in publications connected to Stewart Brand’s world, post–Whole Earth Catalog; he later became the first editor in chief of Wired. Kevin thinks that objects we perceive to exist in software really exist.

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I was delighted to provide a blurb for his book What Technology Wants, stating that it was the best presentation of a philosophy I didn’t share. Kevin remembers that we all came upon our ideas just now, let’s say three minutes ago. We shouldn’t treat our ideas about computation as hallowed. He has a sense of humor and an open mind. John Perry Barlow claims to have a perfect memory of meeting me at a hacker retreat, but I can prove I wasn’t there. It’s weird, because he’s supposed to be the one with crystal-clear memory of everything, and I’m supposed to be the one living in a fog. Barlow and I got close fast; we have a lot in common. He had been a rancher in Wyoming and found fancy city life to be as much of a put-on as I did.

The Smartphone Society
by Nicole Aschoff

When Losse asked for clarification Zuckerberg explained, “It means that the best thing to do now, if you want to change the world, is to start a company. It’s the best model for getting things done and bringing your vision to the world.”24 Zuckerberg’s sentiment echoes Electronic Frontier Foundation founding member John Perry Barlow’s oft-cited manifesto: “Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.”25 Peter Thiel shares Zuckerberg’s and Barlow’s desire for autonomy and space to build new Utopias.

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Moazed and Johnson, Modern Monopolies, 62. 19. Brynjolfsson and McAfee, The Second Machine Age, 106. 20. Anderson, “The End of Theory.” 21. Harris, “Inside the First Church of Artificial Intelligence.” 22. O’Gieblyn, “Ghost in the Cloud.” 23. Ullman, Life in Code, 295. 24. Losse, The Boy Kings, 201–2. 25. See John Perry Barlow, “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace,” Electronic Frontier Foundation website, https://www.eff.org/cyberspace-independence. 26. On Fordlandia, see Grandin, Fordlandia. 27. Popper, “A Cryptocurrency Millionaire Wants to Build a Utopia in Nevada.” 28. Trachtenberg, Incorporation of America, 39. 29.

Death Glitch: How Techno-Solutionism Fails Us in This Life and Beyond
by Tamara Kneese
Published 14 Aug 2023

She also anticipated the historical importance of his public illness and death: “Looking back, I realize now that I had watched history happen in the ether through a community of pioneers who were planting the seeds for what social networking would become.”6 Invoking “pioneers” and “seeds,” she mirrors the language used by other techie visionaries—such as Stewart Brand from the WELL and John Perry Barlow from the Electronic Frontier Foundation—tying both Mandel and herself to a rarified group of early adopters of nascent technologies. In the World Wide Web’s heady first days, Mandel’s online death was unusual. But with the rise of personal blogs and social media posts, nontechies can now easily share their illness trajectories with online audiences.

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Rheingold’s writings about the possibilities afforded by electronic communities foreshadowed the breathless hopes of Web 2.0 proponents. 22. Rheingold, The Virtual Community, 16. 23. Rheingold, The Virtual Community, 21. 24. The idea of the early internet as a frontier, conjuring Manifest Destiny and the libertarian ethos of the Wild West, is mirrored in John Perry Barlow’s Electronic Frontier Foundation, founded in 1990. Barlow wrote lyrics for the Grateful Dead and was a free web advocate. Given the early internet’s relationship to homesteading and communalism, it is no accident that “seeds” and “pioneers” pepper the language used to describe the early web and its adherents. 25.

The Dark Cloud: How the Digital World Is Costing the Earth
by Guillaume Pitron
Published 14 Jun 2023

In their defence, three types of professionals have, over the last few decades, played a role in detaching users from this reality: theorists, advertisers, and designers. First, the theorists. These pioneers designed the internet as a forum for total freedom of speech, where libertarians and radical libertarians advocated the removal of the state. One of these radicals was political activist John Perry Barlow. In 1966, opposed to state control of the internet, he put forth his famous Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace: ‘Your legal concepts of property, expression, identity, movement, and context do not apply to us. They are all based on matter, and there is no matter here.’ According to Barlow, only in an electronic world, free of the shackles of the physical world, is political emancipation possible: ‘Our identities have no bodies, so, unlike you, we cannot obtain order by physical coercion.’22 This utopia of liberation from matter is echoed in the business world.

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Hegel, for whom the spirituality of art increases as it separates from matter, and the French art historian Henri Focillon, for whom ‘there is no abstraction that is not yet matter, in all its volatility, and that is not subject to the structural forces of matter, gravity, inertia, rhythm, etc.’ For further reading, Arnaud Macé presents select texts on the debate in his book La Matière [‘Matter’] (Flammarion, 2013). 22 John Perry Barlow, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, 8 February 1996. 23 Fritz Machlup, The Production and Distribution of Knowledge in the United States, Princeton University Press, 1972. 24 If indeed ‘our growth is based on raw materials, it cannot be infinite. If it is based on knowledge, however, infinite growth is very easily to achieve’, postulates the French researcher Idriss Aberkane in a HuffPost blog in 2014.

Hacking Politics: How Geeks, Progressives, the Tea Party, Gamers, Anarchists and Suits Teamed Up to Defeat SOPA and Save the Internet
by David Moon , Patrick Ruffini , David Segal , Aaron Swartz , Lawrence Lessig , Cory Doctorow , Zoe Lofgren , Jamie Laurie , Ron Paul , Mike Masnick , Kim Dotcom , Tiffiniy Cheng , Alexis Ohanian , Nicole Powers and Josh Levy
Published 30 Apr 2013

The best ideas win through vigorous debate and testing. No one has seniority or a veto. There’s no influence peddling or lobbyists. The engineers are allergic to hypocrisy and public relations rhetoric. It’s as pure a form of democracy as has ever been implemented. And it works amazingly well. John Perry Barlow We have no elected government, nor are we likely to have one, so I address you with no greater authority than that with which liberty itself always speaks. I declare the global social space we are building to be naturally independent of the tyrannies you seek to impose on us. You have no moral right to rule us nor do you possess any methods of enforcement we have true reason to fear.

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As a libertarian, I marveled at the complete freedom it afforded its participants. The Internet could serve as a model for self-government. No bureaucrat controlled it, and you didn’t need permission to hit the Publish button. Free speech was finally and truly, free. The words penned by former Grateful Dead lyricist John Perry Barlow, in his Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace (itself issued in the immediate aftermath of the CDA), have stuck with me in the years since: Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone.

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The engineers are allergic to hypocrisy and public relations rhetoric. It’s as pure a form of democracy as has ever been implemented. And it works amazingly well. Today’s Internet activists have adopted those engineering principles as their political philosophy. In that sense, their core ideals have not changed much since 1996, when John Perry Barlow published his prophetic “Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace” in response to an equally ill-considered law that banned “indecent” content from the then-primitive World Wide Web (the U.S. Supreme Court quickly threw it out as unconstitutional). “We have no elected government,” Barlow wrote, “nor are we likely to have one, so I address you with no greater authority than that with which liberty itself always speaks.”

Fire in the Valley: The Birth and Death of the Personal Computer
by Michael Swaine and Paul Freiberger
Published 19 Oct 2014

One day in the summer of 1990, he even found himself on a cattle ranch in Wyoming talking computers with John Perry Barlow, a former lyricist of the Grateful Dead. What led to that unlikely meeting was a series of events that bode ill for civil liberties in the new wired world. A few months earlier, some anonymous individual, for whatever motive, had “liberated” a piece of the proprietary, secret operating-system code for the Apple Macintosh and had mailed it on floppy disks to influential people in the computer industry. Kapor was one of these people; John Perry Barlow—the former Grateful Dead lyricist, current cattle rancher, and computer gadfly—was not.

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What’s more, most of the millions whose worlds have been utterly transformed by bit-boxes don’t know a thing about their origins. But if you’re going to read one history book this decade, read this one. You need to know the hilarious saga of the wizards and the wing nuts and the little miracles by which they created everybody’s future. → John Perry Barlow Peripheral Visionary executive vice president; Algae Systems cofounder; and rocking chair, Electronic Frontier Foundation This must-read classic tale of the origins of the personal computer and its role in the evolution of Silicon Valley continues to evolve and inform. In an era when we take the personal computer for granted, we tend to forget the risk-taking and ambition that was required to shift from a hobbyist plaything to a thriving industry.

Crypto: How the Code Rebels Beat the Government Saving Privacy in the Digital Age
by Steven Levy
Published 15 Jan 2002

One forceful ally was thirty-seven-year-old John Gilmore, a gentle computer hacker with long thinning hair and a wispy beard (when he stood beside Eric Hughes, the two of them looked like a geeky version of the cough-drop-icon Smith Brothers). Gilmore had made a small fortune from being one of the original programmers at Sun Microsystems—he had been employee number five—but left in 1986. In 1990, along with Mitch Kapor and Grateful Dead lyricist John Perry Barlow, he’d founded the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) to enforce civil liberties in the digital age, and had just started a new company called Cygnus Support, devoted to aiding users of free software. His hobby-horse was personal privacy. At a 1991 conference called “Computers, Freedom, and Privacy,” he delivered a speech that anticipated the thoughts of Mays and Hughes—a people’s crypto movement to stave off the government.

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Their campaign speeches might have been about bridges to the future, but Gore’s vision was of an Information Highway to transform the country and indeed the globe. Gore arranged to bring some of the most techno-savvy Senate staffers to the White House to help on digital matters, people like Mike Nelson, a former MIT geophysicist experienced in Info-Highway issues. They were “extremely smart, conscious freedom-lovers,” wrote John Perry Barlow, who got to know them in his role as Electronic Frontier Foundation cofounder. “Hell, a lot of them are Deadheads. I was sure that after they were fully moved in, they’d face down the National Security Agency and the FBI.” Barlow had mistakenly assumed that because the Clinton staffers recognized the opening chords of “Sugar Magnolia,” they’d be immune to top-secret doom lectures from the star-spangled crypto boys at Fort George Meade.

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The briefings with Congress and industry went pretty much as expected: the proposal was received cautiously, even skeptically, but not dismissed out of hand. One legislative staffer complained that when the Clinton people were challenged, they went on the offensive. “Do you want to be responsible for kidnappers?” the Clintonistas would ask, and the legislators would crumble. The sessions with civil liberties groups weren’t so cordial. John Perry Barlow of the Electronic Frontier Foundation got one of those last-minute briefings and couldn’t believe his ears. He felt that his new friends in the White House had been “drinking the Kool-Aid,” a national security version of Jonestown. What particularly offended him was Mike Nelson’s invocation of the classified information he had heard and Barlow had not.

Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest
by Zeynep Tufekci
Published 14 May 2017

For example, during the early days of the internet, there were many theories that speculated that the internet would make race and gender less important, that our bodies would become irrelevant, and that “cyberspace” would become a place that would be free of bodies, a place where ideas and rationality ruled. Take this early statement by John Perry Barlow in his “Cyberspace Independence Declaration”: We are creating a world that all may enter without privilege or prejudice accorded by race, economic power, military force, or station of birth. We are creating a world where anyone, anywhere may express his or her beliefs, no matter how singular, without fear of being coerced into silence or conformity.

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Massimo Ragnedda and Glenn W. Muschert, The Digital Divide: The Internet and Social Inequality in International Perspective (New York: Routledge, 2013); Eszter Hargittai, “The Digital Divide and What to Do about It,” in New Economy Handbook, ed. Derek C. Jones (San Diego: Academic Press, 2003), 821–39. 25. John Perry Barlow, “A Cyberspace Independence Declaration,” 1996, https://w2.eff.org/Censorship/Internet_censorship_bills/barlow_0296.declaration. 26. In fact, “exclusion” in a digital world implies a whole host of differences from living in a predigital one where nobody was included. It is one thing not to have a telephone number in a world where nobody has one; it is a different thing to be a person without a phone in a world in which it is expected that one will have a phone to perform most basic functions: apply for a job, connect with people, or have a political life.

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The site is not truly anonymous because the site administrators can trace each participant (unless the person uses privacy-preserving options like TOR or VPNs), but they are anonymous to one another and cannot trace posting history. 10. Emily Nussbaum, “Mothers Anonymous,” New York Magazine, July 24, 2006, http://nymag.com/news/features/17668/. 11. Sherry Turkle, Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995). 12. John Perry Barlow, “A Cyberspace Independence Declaration,” 1996, https://w2.eff.org/Censorship/Internet_censorship_bills/barlow_0296.declaration. 13. Jessie Daniels, Cyber Racism: White Supremacy Online and the New Attack on Civil Rights (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2009); Lisa, Nakamura, Cybertypes: Race, Ethnicity, and Identity on the Internet (New York: Routledge, 2002). 14.

Protocol: how control exists after decentralization
by Alexander R. Galloway
Published 1 Apr 2004

When poured in a vessel, water will fill the vessel completely; when poured into a computer network, the hacker will enter any space available to him. In fact, possibility often erases the unethical in the mind of the hacker. An anecdote from the legendary hacker Acid Phreak illustrates this well. After being told certain personal details about his rhetorical opponent John Perry Barlow, information that he would later use to obtain Barlow’s credit history, Acid Phreak screamed, “Mr. Barlow: Thank you for posting all I need to know to get your credit information and a whole lot more! Now, who is to blame? ME for getting it or YOU for being such an idiot?!”50 Most hackers would answer: You, for being such an idiot.

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In 1999 Etoy was sued by the Internet toy retailer eToys, who claimed that Internet toy buyers might be confused and potentially offended by the artists’s Web site if they typed E-T-O-Y into their Internet browsers rather than E-T-O-Y-S. Since the artists had been using the name well prior to the toy retailer, many in the art world were upset by the lawsuit. The pro-Etoy position received extensive grassroots support from thousands of Internet users including civil liberties advocate John Perry Barlow and author Douglas Rushkoff. The press was also very supportive of the anti-eToys campaign. 34. See http://www.arts.ucsb.edu/bodiesinc. 35. See http://www.etoy.com. 36. A collection of Etoy stock certificates were exhibited for the first time in New York in the spring of 2000 at Postmasters Gallery.

Pax Technica: How the Internet of Things May Set Us Free or Lock Us Up
by Philip N. Howard
Published 27 Apr 2015

But they are all often dedicated to pushing back on onerous government regulations over their internet access, and some participate in, or eagerly read about, technology issues from the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Center for Democracy and Technology, tweet about the latest reports on their country from the Open Society Foundation or Reporters Without Borders, run Tor Project software quietly on their home equipment, and even participate in training sessions from the Tactical Technology Collective. Even the most banal technology standards in the poorest of countries get scrutinized by civic groups emboldened by John Perry Barlow’s “Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace,” or Hillary Clinton’s arguments that internet freedoms are a foreign policy priority.18 When I visited Tajikistan a few years ago, the government simply didn’t have an employee who was in charge of public-spectrum allocation. The Aga Khan Foundation was providing a staff of three Western-educated computer science interns to help set policy.19 Who would have thought that young civil-society actors would want to weigh in on how the public spectrum gets allocated, or want to attend specialized International Telecommunication Union meetings on internet protocols?

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Rachel Haot, “Open Government Initiatives Helped New Yorkers Stay Connected During Hurricane Sandy,” TechCrunch, January 11, 2013, accessed September 30, 2014, http://techcrunch.com/2013/01/11/data-and-digital-saved-lives-in-nyc-during-hurricane-sandy/. 16. Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2011). 17. “Global Voices,” accessed June 30, 2014, http://globalvoicesonline.org. 18. John Perry Barlows, “Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace,” 1996, accessed September 30, 2014, http://wac.colostate.edu/rhetnet/barlow/barlow_declaration.html; Hillary Clinton, “Internet Freedom: The Prepared Text of Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton’s Speech, Delivered at the Newseum in Washington, DC,” Foreign Policy, January 21, 2010, accessed September 30, 2014, http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2010/01/21/internet_freedom. 19.

The Dark Net
by Jamie Bartlett
Published 20 Aug 2014

Many techno-optimists, such as the cheerleaders for the networked revolution Wired and Mondo 2000 magazines, believed cyberspace would herald a new dawn of learning and understanding, even the end of the national state. The best statement of this view was the American essayist and prominent cyberlibertarian John Perry Barlow’s 1996 ‘Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace’, which announced to the real world that ‘your legal concepts of property, expression, identity, movement, and context do not apply to us . . . our identities have no bodies, so, unlike you, we cannot obtain order by physical coercion.’ Barlow believed that the lack of censorship and the anonymity that the net seemed to offer would foster a freer, more open society, because people could cast off the tyranny of their fixed real-world identities and create themselves anew.

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Many of the net’s early advocates believed that, by enabling people to communicate more freely with each other, it would help to end misunderstanding and hatred. Nicholas Negroponte – former Director of the illustrious MIT Media Lab – declared in 1997 that the internet would bring about world peace, and the end of nationalism. For some, like John Perry Barlow, author of the ‘Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace’, this new, free world could help to create just, humane and liberal societies – better than those ‘weary giants of flesh and steel’. But it was not only the optimists commenting on the possibilities presented by this strange new world.

Social Life of Information
by John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid
Published 2 Feb 2000

Hence the quasi-rural talk of "televillages" and "electronic cottages."2 Somewhere in here, then, is that familiar hope that the road to the future will somehow take us back to the simplicities of the past. Yet other enthusiasts see no reason to stop at the village. The cyberguru and writer John Perry Barlow extols the nomadic life. He was a rancher in Wyoming, but now believes his laptop and cell phone, allowing him to work anywhere, free him from ties to place or community, making him an itinerant citizen of the global village of cyberspace (for which he issued a declaration of independence).3 In all of this, there is a mixture of hype and hope with some quite reasonable forecasting.

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Yet with the digital, while transportation and mobility are enhanced, immutability is diminished. Some documents, such as Web pages, are constantly changing. On the Web it can be very hard to know what the "same document" might mean.48 So some people argue that the old balancing act is over: Fixity has given way to fluidity. And others add, don't worry. John Perry Barlow, for example, argues that with information technology, the economy is shifting over to a service economy of fluid practices, not fixed products.49 A songwriter himself, Barlow claims that musicians must shift their income streams from products and copyrights (that rely on fixity) to performance (which is fluid).50 In a similar vein though a different context, Davenport and Prusak point the same way: "Firms," they argue, "need to shift their attention from documents to discussion."51 Firms, as Davenport and Prusak are well aware, should only Page 199 shift some of their attention in this direction.

The People's Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age
by Astra Taylor
Published 4 Mar 2014

However imprecisely the terms are applied, the dichotomy of open versus closed (sometimes presented as freedom versus control) provides the conceptual framework that increasingly underpins much of the current thinking about technology, media, and culture. The fetish for openness can be traced back to the foundational myths of the Internet as a wild, uncontrollable realm. In 1996 John Perry Barlow, the former Grateful Dead lyricist and cattle ranger turned techno-utopian firebrand, released an influential manifesto, “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace,” from Davos, Switzerland, during the World Economic Forum, the annual meeting of the world’s business elite. (“Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind.

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Unencumbered by our fleshy selves and released from the material conditions that constrain them, everyone would be made equal by binary code, free to participate as peers on an open network. “We are creating a world that all may enter without privilege or prejudice accorded by race, economic power, military force, or station of birth. Ours is a world that is both everywhere and nowhere, but it is not where bodies live,” John Perry Barlow wrote in his influential Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace. “The caste system is an artifact of the world of atom,” Nicholas Negroponte declared. Before he reinvented himself as a techno-skeptic, the virtual reality pioneer Jaron Lanier concurred. “The Web was built by millions of people simply because they wanted it, without need, greed, fear, hierarchy, authority figures, ethnic identification, advertising, or any other form of manipulation,” he enthused.

Road to Nowhere: What Silicon Valley Gets Wrong About the Future of Transportation
by Paris Marx
Published 4 Jul 2022

Turner explained that through this venture, Brand positioned “the corporation as a site of revolutionary social change and interpersonal and information networks … as tools and emblems of that change,”23 a continuation of the message he promoted as the communalists reintegrated into society in the 1970s. The middle-class and even wealthy community that Whole Earth cultivated had already shunned the poor and people of color, and they were primed to buy into the right-wing ideologies of the 1980s and beyond. John Perry Barlow, co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) in 1990—a non-profit that took a libertarian approach to digital rights—believed that government had no authority over what happened on the internet. In 1996, he released an influential essay from Davos, Switzerland, called “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace,” in which he positioned governments as the enemy of the public, and especially of the communities and marketplaces being established on the internet, even though the government had funded the creation of the very network that make those interactions possible.

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Understanding the Silicon Valley Worldview 1 Margaret O’Mara, The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America, Penguin Books, 2020, p. 7. 2 Ibid., p. 15. 3 AnnaLee Saxenian, Regional Advantage: Culture and Competition in Silicon Valley and Route 128, Harvard University Press, 1996. 4 O’Mara, The Code, pp. 75–6. 5 Tom Wolfe, “The Tinkerings of Robert Noyce,” Esquire, December 1983, Classic.esquire.com. 6 Fred Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism, University of Chicago Press, 2006, p. 31. 7 Ibid., p. 73. 8 Ibid., p. 76. 9 Ibid., p. 14. 10 Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron, “The Californian Ideology,” Science as Culture 6:1, 1996, imaginaryfutures.net. 11 Saxenian, Regional Advantage, p. 90. 12 O’Mara, The Code, p. 214. 13 Ibid., p. 226. 14 Peter Thiel, “The End of the Future,” National Review, October 3, 2011, Nationalreview.com. 15 Tom Simonite, “Technology Stalled in 1970,” MIT Technology Review, September 18, 2014, Technologyreview.com. 16 David Graeber, “Of Flying Cars and the Declining Rate of Profit,” The Baffler 19, March 2012, Thebaffler.com. 17 O’Mara, The Code, pp. 90–1. 18 Tim Maughan, “The Modern World Has Finally Become Too Complex for Any of Us to Understand,” OneZero, November 30, 2020, Onezero.medium.com. 19 Ibid. 20 Senator Gore, speaking on S. 1067, 101st Congress, 1st sess., Congressional Record 135, May 18, 1989, S 9887. 21 Daniel Greene, The Promise of Access: Technology, Inequality, and the Political Economy of Hope, MIT Press, 2011. 22 Madeline Carr, US Power and the Internet in International Relations: The Irony of the Information Age, Palgrave Macmillan, 2016, p. 58 (author’s emphasis). 23 Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture, p. 194. 24 John Perry Barlow, “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace,” February 8, 1996, Eff.org. 25 Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture, p. 209. 26 Ibid., p. 222. 27 Ibid. 28 Mariana Mazzucato, The Entrepreneurial State: Debunking Public vs. Private Sector Myths, Anthem Press, 2013. 29 Carmen Hermosillo, “Pandora’s Vox: On Community in Cyberspace,” 1994, Gist.github.com. 30 Jennifer S.

The Sovereign Individual: How to Survive and Thrive During the Collapse of the Welfare State
by James Dale Davidson and William Rees-Mogg
Published 3 Feb 1997

It will change the nature of sovereignties and transform economies, as the balance between protection and extortion swings more completely on the side of protection than it has ever done before. 143 "The Sovereign Individual" by James Dale Davidson & Lord William Rees-Mogg Simon & Schuster 1997 Chapter 7 TRANSCENDING LOCALITY The Emergence of the Cybereconomy "The real issue is control. The Internet is too widespread to be easily dominated by any single government. By creating a seamless global-economic zone, anti-sovereign and unregulatable, the Internet calls into question the very idea of a nationstate." JOHN PERRY BARLOW The Information Superhighway has become one of the more familiar metaphors of the early days of the digital age. It is remarkable not only for its pervasiveness, but also for the common misunderstanding it betrays about the cybereconomy. A highway, after all, is an industrial version of a footpath, a network for the physical transit of people and goods.

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Cyberspace transcends locality It involves nothing less than the instantaneous sharing of data everywhere and nowhere at once. The emerging information economy is based in the interconnections linking and relinking millions of users of millions of computers. Its essence lies in the new possibilities that arise from these connections. As John Perry Barlow put it, "What the Net offers is the promise of a new social space, global and anti-sovereign, within which anybody, anywhere can express to the rest of humanity whatever he or she believes without fear. There is in these new media a foreshadowing of the intellectual and economic liberty that might undo all the authoritarian powers on earth." 2 Cyberspace, like the imaginary realm of Homer's gods, is a realm apart from the familiar terrestrial world of farm and factory.

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James Adams, "Dawn of the Cyber Soldiers," The Sunday Times (London), October 15, 1995, pp.3-5. 47. Kelly, op. cit., p.19. 48. George Melloan, "Welfare State Reform Is Mostly Mythological," The Wall Street Journal. October 14, 1996, p. A19. Chapter 7. Transcending Locality: The Emergence of the Cybereconomy John Perry Barlow, "Thinking Locally, Acting Globally," Time, January 15, 1996, p.57. 2. Ibid. 3. M. C. Seymour, ed., Mandeville:' Travels (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968), p.122. 4. R. C. Johnson, "The Transportation of Vagrant Children from London to Virginia, 1618-1622," in H. S. Reinmuth, ed., Early Stuart Studies (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1970), pp. ~43-44, quoted in Jutte, op.

Your Computer Is on Fire
by Thomas S. Mullaney , Benjamin Peters , Mar Hicks and Kavita Philip
Published 9 Mar 2021

In doing so, technical communities produce themselves as actors able to act “for the good of the internet,” in relation to political and economic interests.37 Infrastructures, Mathew reminds us, are relations, not things.38 Drawing on feminist informatics scholar Susan Leigh Star, and using his ethnography of network engineers to articulate how those relations are always embedded in human history and sociality, Mathew distinguishes his analysis from that encapsulated in John Perry Barlow’s 1996 A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace. Avowing that the internet does offer radical new social possibilities, he suggests that these are not because it transcends human politics but rather because it is “actively produced in the ongoing efforts and struggles of the social formations and technologies involved in the distributed governance of Internet infrastructure.”39 Mathew’s aim is “to uncover the internal logic of the production of the virtual space of the Internet, and the manner in which the production of virtual space opposes and reconciles itself with the production of the spaces of the nation state, and the spaces of capital.”40 His study begins with a methodological question as original as Stephenson’s.

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The internet is constituted by entangled infrastructural and human narratives that cannot be understood via separate technological and humanistic histories. The historical forces that simultaneously shaped modern ontological assumptions about human difference and infrastructures of technological globalization are alive today. Racial, gendered, and national differences are embedded, in both familiar and surprising ways, in a space that John Perry Barlow once described as a utopia free from the tyranny of corporate and national sovereignty. With sympathy for Barlow’s passionate manifesto for cyberspace’s independence from the prejudices of the industrial era (“We are creating a world that all may enter without privilege or prejudice accorded by race, economic power, military force, or station of birth,” he announced in Davos in 1996),43 this chapter recognizes, also, that we cannot get there from here if we uncritically reuse the narratives and technologies thus far deployed by the internet’s visionaries, bureaucrats, builders, and regulators.

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Archived at https://www.moma.org/collection/works/110263 and the Internet Archive, https://web.archive.org/web/*/opte.org. 42. Abigail De Kosnik, Benjamin De Kosnik, and Jingyi Li, “A Ratings System for Piracy: Quantifying and Mapping BitTorrent Activity for ‘The Walking Dead,’” unpublished manuscript, 2017. 43. John Perry Barlow, “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace,” Davos, Switzerland, February 8, 1996, Electronic Frontier Foundation, https://www.eff.org/cyberspace-independence. 44. The Wikimedia Foundation supports efforts to decolonize knowledge because, simply, their claim to house the sum of all knowledge in the world has been shown, by social movements from the Global South, to be woefully incomplete.

The Politics of Bitcoin: Software as Right-Wing Extremism
by David Golumbia
Published 25 Sep 2016

This belief was articulated with particular force in the 1996 “Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace” written by the libertarian activist, Grateful Dead lyricist, and Electronic Frontier Foundation founder (EFF is a leading “digital rights” and technology industry advocacy organization) John Perry Barlow, which declared that “governments of the industrial world” are “not welcome” in and “have no sovereignty” over the digital realm. In practice, opposition to “government regulation of the internet” is best understood as a core (and in important ways vague) tenet, around which circulate greater and greater claims for the “freedom” created by digital technology.

Stealing Fire: How Silicon Valley, the Navy SEALs, and Maverick Scientists Are Revolutionizing the Way We Live and Work
by Steven Kotler and Jamie Wheal
Published 21 Feb 2017

“So embedded, so accepted has Burning Man become4 in parts of tech culture,” wrote journalist Vanessa Hua in the San Francisco Chronicle, “that the event alters work rhythms, shows up on resumes, is even a sanctioned form of professional development—all signs that the norm has adopted parts of the formerly deviant happening.” Over the last decade in particular, the festival has become a regular stop for those whose calendar might include Davos, TED, and a slew of other high-profile gatherings. In 2013, John Perry Barlow, a fellow at Harvard Law School5 and former lyricist for the Grateful Dead, casually tweeted from Burning Man: “Spent much of the afternoon in conversation with Larry Harvey, Mayor of Burning Man and Gen. Wesley Clark, who is here.” At one of the more infamous parties on the planet, countercultural royalty are hobnobbing with a former Supreme Commander of NATO turned U.S. presidential candidate.

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You sink to your level of training: This quote is frequently attributed to an anonymous Navy SEAL (and often repeated by team members), but it most likely originated with the Greek poet Archilochus. “If you haven’t been [to Burning Man]’”: Nellie Bowles, “At HBO’s ‘Silicon Valley’ Premiere, Elon Musk Has Some Notes,” ReCode, April 3, 2014. 4. “So embedded, so accepted has Burning Man become”: Vanessa Hua, “Burning Man,” SFGate, August 20, 2000. 5. In 2013, John Perry Barlow, a fellow at Harvard Law School: @JPBarlow, Twitter. 6. Three years later, the actual president: “Just recently, a young person came up to me and said she was sick of politicians standing in the way of her dreams—as if we were actually going to let Malia go to Burning Man this year. Was not going to happen.

You Are Here: From the Compass to GPS, the History and Future of How We Find Ourselves
by Hiawatha Bray
Published 31 Mar 2014

On the Internet nobody knows you are in Denver, or in Denmark, and even if people happened to know your location, it would not matter. Given a high-end computer and a high-speed broadband link, anyone anywhere could rival the mightiest global corporations and challenge the most despotic governments. Former Grateful Dead lyricist John Perry Barlow famously sang the song of the locationless Internet in his Utopian manifesto of 1996: “Ours is a world that is both everywhere and nowhere, but it is not where bodies live. . . . Your legal concepts of property, expression, identity, movement, and context do not apply to us. They are all based on matter, and there is no matter here.”1 Of course, the Internet is, ultimately, based in the physical world.

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Catherine Shu, “Nav App Waze Says 36M Users Shared 900M Reports, While 65K Users Made 500M Map Edits,” TechCrunch, February 6, 2013, http://techcrunch.com/2013/02/06/nav-app-waze-says-36m-users-shared-900m-reports-while-65k-users-made-500m-map-edits/. 29. Jessica Guynn, “Google Acquisition Keeps Waze Out of Rivals’ Hands,” Los Angeles Times, June 12, 2013. Chapter 9 1. John Perry Barlow, “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace,” February 8, 1996, https://projects.eff.org/~barlow/Declaration-Final.html. 2. Thomas Lowenthal, “IP Address Can Now Pin Down Your Location to Within a Half Mile,” Ars Technica, April 22, 2011, http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2011/04/getting-warmer-an-ip-address-can-map-you-within-half-a-mile/. 3.

The Pirate's Dilemma: How Youth Culture Is Reinventing Capitalism
by Matt Mason

Are they a threat to be battled, or innovators we should compete with and learn from? To compete or not to compete—that is the question—perhaps the most important economic and cultural question of the twenty-first century. A man at the intersection between youth culture and innovation named John Perry Barlow, the cofounder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and former lyricist for the Grateful Dead, summarized the problem in 2003: Throughout the time I've been groping around cyberspace, an immense, unsolved conundrum has remained at the root of nearly every legal, ethical, governmental, and social vexation to be found in the Virtual World.

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Because she is next to me, every day is a little better than the one before. NOTES This original composition contains samples and elements from the following original compositions: Dr. Dre quote from the album Straight Outta Compton by N.W.A. (Ruthless/Priority Records, 1988). INTRO: Enter the Lollipop John Perry Barlow, “The Economy of Ideas,” Wired no. 2.03 (March 1994). www.wired.com/wired/archive/2.03/economy.ideas.html. E. F. Schumacher, Small Is Beautiful (Point Roberts, WA: Hartley & Marks Publishers, 1999), p. 33. “Marc Ecko,” interview by David Gensler, Royal Magazine 2, no. 9 (Winter 2006). http://www.theroyalmagazine.com.

Consent of the Networked: The Worldwide Struggle for Internet Freedom
by Rebecca MacKinnon
Published 31 Jan 2012

Citizens’groups in various parts of the world will use the La Rue report as a powerful tool in pushing for more reasonable human rights and democratic approaches to Internet regulation. CIVIL SOCIETY PUSHES BACK On the eve of the May 2011 e-G8 meeting in Paris, former Grateful Dead lyricist and Electronic Frontier Foundation cofounder John Perry Barlow sent out a tweet quoting Sarkozy: “the Internet is a new frontier, a territory to conquer.” Then he added, “And I am in Paris to stop him.” “For the first time in human history, it is possible to convey to every human being the right to know . . . and the right to express him or herself,” Barlow later declared from the stage.

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These extraordinary summer hack-fests are complemented by yearly winter conferences the CCC website describes as a “diverse audience of thousands of hackers, scientists, artists, and utopians from all around the world.” It is at such events that many of the new tools and techniques of digital resistance are first tested and deployed. UTOPIANISM VERSUS REALITY In 1996, John Perry Barlow famously wrote a manifesto titled “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace.” It began, “Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us.

Reinventing the Bazaar: A Natural History of Markets
by John McMillan
Published 1 Jan 2002

Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the world wide web (which he did not patent), has called for software developers to fight the patent system. He and other computer engineers believe software should be nonproprietary, so people could give it to each other and build on each other’s work, as indeed happened in the early days of computers. John Perry Barlow, founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a group fighting against intellectual property in cyberspace, said, “Copyright is not about creation, which will happen anyway: it is about distribution.” This is the key question: if software were free, would creation happen anyway? Some programs are written with no expectation of a patent.

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“I think it’s okay,” said Jerry Garcia, the band’s leader, in 1975. “If people like it they can certainly keep doing it. I don’t have any desire to control people as to what they’re doing and what they have.” Despite the bootlegs—or because of them—the Grateful Dead earned more from their concert tours than most other rock bands. John Perry Barlow, who was a lyricist for the Dead before he became an internet activist, said permitting the copying “was the smartest thing we could have done. We raised the sales of our records considerably because of it.”8 The court heard expert testimony on Napster’s effect on compact disc sales. On Napster’s side were consumer surveys suggesting that Napster actually promoted purchases.

#Republic: Divided Democracy in the Age of Social Media
by Cass R. Sunstein
Published 7 Mar 2017

Shouldn’t government simply leave the scene? Shouldn’t it eliminate regulation altogether? The same argument is being made about the Internet, even more forcefully, with the suggestion that it should be taken as a kind of government-free zone. In 1996, free speech activist (and former Grateful Dead lyricist) John Perry Barlow produced an influential “Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace,” urging, among other things, “Governments of the Industrial World . . . I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather. . . . You have no moral right to rule us nor do you possess any methods of enforcement we have true reason to fear.”1 That sounds like 1960s’ stuff, a kind of My Generation manifesto, opposing the we-who-gather to those of the past.

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Hirschmann, The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism before Its Triumph (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1967). 13.See Jon Elster, Sour Grapes: Studies in the Subversion of Rationality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). 14.Verisign, The Domain Name Industry Brief 13, no. 1 (2016), http://www.verisign.com/assets/domain-name-report-april2016.pdf (accessed September 8, 2016). 15.For a good discussion, see Robert H. Frank, Luxury Fever: Weighing the Cost of Excess (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998). 16.See ibid. 17.See ibid. 7. WHAT’S REGULATION? A PLEA 1.John Perry Barlow, “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace,” Electronic Frontier Foundation, February 8, 1996, http://homes.eff.org/~barlow/Declaration-Final.html (accessed July 31, 2016). 2.Richard Posner, Catastrophe: Risk and Response (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 85. 3.See Internet Security Threat Report 21 (2016), https://www.symantec.com/content/dam/symantec/docs/reports/istr-21-2016-en.pdf (accessed September 8, 2016). 4.Elinor Ostrom, Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Robert C.

Is the Internet Changing the Way You Think?: The Net's Impact on Our Minds and Future
by John Brockman
Published 18 Jan 2011

People were popping “smart” drugs (which didn’t do anything), Timothy Leary declared virtual reality the next psychedelic (which never panned out), Todd Rundgren warned of a coming overabundance of creative work without a parallel rise in great ideas (which is now reflected in laments about the rise of the amateur). It was still the old underground, running the new emerging culture. This new culture was driven by thought rather than art, though. That’s also where I met Cliff Figallo, who ran a virtual community called the WELL. He introduced me to John Perry Barlow, who had just established the Electronic Frontier Foundation. The name said it all: There was a new frontier. It would still take me a few more years to grasp this. One stifling evening in a rented apartment in downtown Dakar, my photographer and I disassembled a phone line and a modem to circumvent incompatible jacks and get our laptop to dial up some node in Paris.

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Over the next decade and a half, I joined the camp of what I have since come to think of as Internet utopians. The Net seemed to offer this shining city on a hill, free from the grit and foulness of the meat world. Ideologically, this was a torch carried by Wired magazine, and the ideal probably reached its zenith in John Perry Barlow’s 1996 essay, “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace.” Silly me. I should have known better. It would all be spelled out clearly in John Brunner’s The Shockwave Rider, William Gibson’s Neuromancer, Neal Stephenson’s Snowcrash, Vernor Vinge’s True Names, and even less-well-read classics such as John Barnes’s The Mother of Storms.

Valley of Genius: The Uncensored History of Silicon Valley (As Told by the Hackers, Founders, and Freaks Who Made It Boom)
by Adam Fisher
Published 9 Jul 2018

Kristen Spence: For those of us who were superyoung, it was just this cool thing happening. But Louis, Kevin, and John Plunkett had the long view. They understood how much things were changing. Amy Critchett: Louis was magnificent. His presence, force, and passion—that’s what made Wired happen. John Perry Barlow: Jane had the real juice. She got people really excited. There were a lot of people that gave them meetings because of her. She had a lot to do with creating the energy in the magazine and, to a fairly strong extent, its attitude as well. Louis Rossetto: Battelle was the most focused, hardest-working manager I’ve ever met.

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And Kevin, who is a genius at this stuff, said, “Well, why don’t you just have it around the clock for twenty-four hours?” Kevin Kelly: We ran it from noon Saturday to noon Sunday. We sold tickets on The Well; we announced it in the magazine. We tried to have as many interesting people come as well. So Bruce Sterling was there, William Gibson, Tim Leary, Robin Williams, Jaron Lanier was there, John Perry Barlow. And of course all the VR people. And I thought the interesting thing would be in the middle of the night. People were tired and it was kind of crazy and dreamy. That was part of the happening aspect of it. R. U. Sirius: There were all these rooms with all this tech stuff being presented. Everybody had their VR stuff there.

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Jim Barksdale was the first CEO of Netscape. He was recruited by Jim Clark, who put up the money and gathered the talent, but it was Barksdale who took Netscape public in 1995 and then kept the company alive while enduring constant attack from Microsoft, until Netscape’s eventual sale to AOL in 1999. John Perry Barlow wears many hats: rancher, activist, writer, lyricist. But if you ask him, he’ll tell you that he’s really a homesteader—in cyberspace. He was probably the best and certainly one of the most prolific writers on The Well, Stewart Brand’s early experiment in social media. In the nineties he was instrumental in founding the Electronic Frontier Foundation and still serves on the board of directors.

Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars From 4Chan and Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-Right
by Angela Nagle
Published 6 Jun 2017

Hakim Bey’s idea of the temporary autonomous zone was based on what he called ‘pirate utopias’ and he argued that the attempt to form a permanent culture or politics inevitably deteriorates into a structured system that stifles individual creativity. His language and ideas influenced anarchism and later, online cultures that advocated illegal downloading, anonymity, hacking and experiments like bitcoin. Echoes of John Perry Barlow’s manifesto ‘A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace’ can be seen in this earlier period of Anon culture and in analyses that reflect a more radical horizontalist politics, like Gabriella Coleman’s work. Barlow was one of the founders of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, anarchist hackers and defenders of an Internet free of state intervention, capitalist control and monopolizing of the online world.

Smarter Than You Think: How Technology Is Changing Our Minds for the Better
by Clive Thompson
Published 11 Sep 2013

Though the U.S. government loves to talk about the free flow of information, when the Web site Wikileaks released internal diplomatic documents and footage of the military killing civilians, politicians and pundits fulminated so ferociously that major U.S. firms like Amazon and Paypal cut off Wikileaks, probably worried about being on the wrong side of a political fight. In 1996, writer and electronic activist John Perry Barlow proclaimed “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace.” Addressing old-school governments—“you weary giants of flesh and steel”—he proclaimed, “You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.” As it turns out, nothing of the sort was true. So is there any way to conduct civic speech in the corporate digital sphere without running afoul of corporate rules or putting activists in danger?

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the FBI violated the law thousands of times: “Patterns of Misconduct: FBI Intelligence Violations from 2001–2008,” Electronic Frontier Foundation, February 23, 2011, accessed March 26, 2013, www.eff.org/wp/patterns-misconduct-fbi-intelligence-violations. Amazon and Paypal cut off Wikileaks: Rebecca MacKinnon, “WikiLeaks, Amazon and the New Threat to Internet Speech,” CNN, December 3, 2010, accessed March 26, 2013, www.cnn.com/2010/OPINION/12/02/mackinnon.wikileaks.amazon/. “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace”: John Perry Barlow, “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace,” February 8, 1996, accessed March 26, 2013, projects.eff.org/~barlow/Declaration-Final.html. The free, open-source Tor: The Tor Project is online here: www.torproject.org/ (ac-cessed March 26, 2013); other modes of encrypted communications are detailed in “Learn to Encrypt Your Internet Communications,” Electronic Frontier Foundation, accessed March 26, 2013, ssd.eff.org/wire/protect/encrypt.

The Fifth Domain: Defending Our Country, Our Companies, and Ourselves in the Age of Cyber Threats
by Richard A. Clarke and Robert K. Knake
Published 15 Jul 2019

As the internet has gone from being the place you go to visit bulletin boards on esoteric topics to undergirding all of modern existence, the early vision for cyberspace as a domain beyond the reach of the state now seems hopelessly naïve. The internet pioneer John Perry Barlow is often held up as the embodiment of this “techno-utopian” vision for the internet. The founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), Barlow is a fascinating character. Steven Levy described him as a “cowboy, poet, romantic, family man, philosopher, and ultimately, the bard of the digital revolution.” When he died in early 2018, Rolling Stone titled his obituary “John Perry Barlow, Grateful Dead Lyricist, Dead at 70.” Barlow wrote such classics as “Mexicali Blues” with band member Bob Weir.

Exponential: How Accelerating Technology Is Leaving Us Behind and What to Do About It
by Azeem Azhar
Published 6 Sep 2021

If the industrial age of nineteenth and twentieth centuries cemented the importance of the nation state, the Exponential Age is shifting much of that significance to great cities. The result is a tension over where decisions about many aspects of the daily lives of more than half of humanity should occur: at the level of the nation state, or closer to home, in the city. John Perry Barlow, the former lyricist of the Grateful Dead, was also an internet rights activist for the Electronic Frontier Foundation. At the World Economic Forum’s Davos summit in 1996 he issued a Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace: Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind.

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, National Defense University Press, 12 July 2016 <http://ndupress.ndu.edu/Media/News/News-Article-View/Article/834357/will-technological-convergence-reverse-globalization/> [accessed 6 September 2020]. 26 Nick Butler, ‘US Energy Independence Has Its Costs’, Financial Times, 2019 <https://www.ft.com/content/20870c24-0b86-11ea-b2d6-9bf4d1957a67> [accessed 10 May 2021]. 27 ‘Urban Population (per cent of Total Population)’, World Bank Data <https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.URB.TOTL.IN.ZS> [accessed 11 January 2021]. 28 Azeem Azhar, ‘Don’t Call Time on the Megacity’, Exponential View, 20 May 2020 <https://www.exponentialview.co/p/-dont-call-time-on-the-megacity> [accessed 13 January 2021]. 29 Genevieve Giuliano, Sanggyun Kang and Quan Yuan, ‘Agglomeration Economies and Evolving Urban Form’, The Annals of Regional Science, 63(3), 2019, pp. 377–398 <https://doi.org/10.1007/s00168-019-00957-4>. 30 Cheng Ting-Fang, ‘How a Small Taiwanese City Transformed the Global Chip Industry’, Nikkei Asia, 15 December 2020 <https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Technology/How-a-small-Taiwanese-city-transformed-the-global-chip-industry> [accessed 13 January 2021]. 31 Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (New York: Random House, 1961), p. 31. 32 West, Scale, pp. 281–88. 33 ‘Bright Lights, Big Cities’, The Economist, 4 February 2015 <https://www.economist.com/node/21642053> [accessed 20 March 2021]. 34 Jeff Desjardins, ‘By 2100 None of the World’s Biggest Cities Will Be in China, the US or Europe’, World Economic Forum, 20 July 2018 <https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/07/by-2100-none-of-the-worlds-biggest-cities-will-be-in-china-the-us-or-europe/> [accessed 20 March 2021]. 35 ‘Cities Worldwide Will Struggle, but Will Avoid a Mass Exodus’, The Economist, 17 November 2020 <https://www.economist.com/the-world-ahead/2020/11/17/cities-worldwide-will-struggle-but-will-avoid-a-mass-exodus> [accessed 20 March 2021]. 36 ‘COVID-19 and the Myth of Urban Flight’, Knowledge@Wharton, 1 December 2020 <https://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/covid-19-and-the-myth-of-urban-flight/> [accessed 13 January 2021]. 37 Samrat Sharma, ‘India’s Rural-Urban Divide: Village Worker Earns Less than Half of City Peer’, Financial Express, 12 December 2019 <https://www.financialexpress.com/economy/indias-rural-urban-divide-village-worker-earns-less-than-half-of-city-peer/1792245/> [accessed 18 March 2021]. 38 ‘Is There Really an Ever-Widening Rural-Urban Divide in Europe’, Euler Hermes Global, 17 July 2019 <https://www.eulerhermes.com/en_global/news-insights/economic-insights/Is-there-really-an-ever-widening-rural-urban-divide-in-Europe.html> [accessed 18 March 2021]. 39 Patrick Greenfield, ‘Uber Licence Withdrawal Disproportionate, Says Theresa May’, The Guardian, 28 September 2017 <http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/sep/28/uber-licence-withdrawal-disproportionate-says-theresa-may> [accessed 23 March 2021]. 40 ‘Why Cities and National Governments Clash over Migration’, Financial Times, 4 June 2019 <https://www.ft.com/content/319ec1f6-5d25-11e9-840c-530737425559>. 41 John Perry Barlow, ‘A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace’, January 1996 <https://www.eff.org/cyberspace-independence> [accessed 7 January 2020]. 42 Andrei Soldatov Borogan Irina, ‘How the 1991 Soviet Internet Helped Stop a Coup and Spread a Message of Freedom’, Slate, August 2016 <https://slate.com/technology/2016/08/the-1991-soviet-internet-helped-stop-a-coup-and-spread-a-message-of-freedom.html> [accessed 31 July 2020]. 43 Berhan Taye and Sage Cheung, ‘The State of Internet Shutdowns in 2018’, Access Now, 8 July 2019 <https://www.accessnow.org/the-state-of-internet-shutdowns-in-2018/> [accessed 19 July 2020]. 44 Claudia Biancotti, ‘India’s Ill-Advised Pursuit of Data Localization’, Pieterson Institute for International Economics, 9 December 2019 <https://www.piie.com/blogs/realtime-economic-issues-watch/indias-ill-advised-pursuit-data-localization> [accessed 20 March 2021]. 45 DLA Piper, Data Protection Laws of the World. 46 Alan Beattie, ‘Data Protectionism: The Growing Menace to Global Business’, Financial Times, 14 May 2018 <https://medium.com/financial-times/data-protectionism-the-growing-menace-to-global-business-f994da37e9e2> [accessed 26 March 2021]. 47 Ian Bremmer, ‘Why We Need a World Data Organization.

Snowden's Box: Trust in the Age of Surveillance
by Jessica Bruder and Dale Maharidge
Published 29 Mar 2020

Before long, he’d completed the Freedom of the Press Foundation’s first website. One of the pages had short biographies of personnel — mostly board members, including Laura and Greenwald, along with other well-known civil liberties champions such as the Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg; John Perry Barlow, the former Grateful Dead lyricist who helped create EFF; and Xeni Jardin, a founder and editor of the blog Boing Boing. As the organization’s lone staff member, Micah appeared at the bottom of the page. Though possibly the least-known figure on that roster of boldfaced names, he stood out.

The Cosmopolites: The Coming of the Global Citizen
by Atossa Araxia Abrahamian
Published 14 Jul 2015

It’s not a coincidence that Ver and Saverin are big names in the tech sector, an industry that is increasingly set on turning all commerce into a convenient, personalized service and “disrupting” traditional enterprise to be faster, cheaper, easier. Given these priorities, why wouldn’t citizenship come next? Ver’s cultural milieu of “solutionists” has emerged among today’s most vocal and powerful proponents of a border-free world of global citizens. John Perry Barlow, a founder of the digital rights group Electronic Frontier Foundation and a lyricist for the Grateful Dead, warned governments of the world of their looming irrelevance in his Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, which was published online in 1996. “Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind,” Barlow typed from a computer in Davos, Switzerland.

Radical Technologies: The Design of Everyday Life
by Adam Greenfield
Published 29 May 2017

AD=ADA295861. 13.Steve Mann, “ ‘Reflectionism’ and ‘Diffusionism’: New Tactics for Deconstructing the Video Surveillance Superhighway,” Leonardo, Volume 31, Number 2, April 1998: pp. 93–102. 14.Lisa Guernsey, “At Airport Gate, A Cyborg Unplugged,” New York Times, March 14, 2002. 15.John Perry Barlow, “Leaving the Physical World,” Conference on HyperNetworking, 1998, w2.eff.org/Misc/Publications/John_Perry_Barlow/HTML/leaving_the_physical_world.html. 16.Governors Highway Safety Association. “Spotlight on Highway Safety: Pedestrian Fatalities by State,” 2010, ghsa.org/html/publications/pdf/spotlights/spotlight_ped.pdf. Similarly, a recent University of Utah study found that the act of immersion in a conversation, rather than any physical aspect of use, is the primary distraction while driving and talking on the phone.

Cybersecurity: What Everyone Needs to Know
by P. W. Singer and Allan Friedman
Published 3 Jan 2014

Some argue that the group is “all bark, no bite,” a new form of a “noisy political demonstration.” Others argue that such critique misses the point: a handful of anonymous computer hackers have garnered worldwide attention for their personal causes, simply by putting forward a new model for mobilization on a global scale. As Electronic Frontier Foundation cofounder John Perry Barlow described, it may well be the new “shot heard round the world—this is Lexington.” The Crimes of Tomorrow, Today: What Is Cybercrime? When we were kids, you could visit a strange, wonderful place known as a “library.” There you could check out an encyclopedia (for you youngsters, imagine a paper Wikipedia) entitled the World of Tomorrow.

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PROTECT WORLD WIDE GOVERNANCE FOR THE WORLD WIDE WEB: WHAT IS THE ROLE OF INTERNATIONAL INSTITUTIONS? “public order or morals” International Telecommunication Union, “Plenipotentiary Conferences,” http://www.itu.int/en/history/Pages/PlenipotentiaryConferences.aspx?conf=1&dms=S0201000001, accessed January 14, 2013. “Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace” John Perry Barlow, “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace,” Electronic Frontier Foundation, https://projects.eff.org/~barlow/Declaration-Final.html, accessed January 14, 2013. “free” part of cyberspace Robert Axelrod, e-mail message to the authors, September 5, 2011. “Nazi memorabilia” Internet Governance Project, “Threat Analysis of the WCIT Part 4: The ITU and Cybersecurity,” June 21, 2012, http://www.internetgovernance.org/2012/06/21/threat-analysis-of-the-wcit-4-cybersecurity/, accessed January 2013.

The Wires of War: Technology and the Global Struggle for Power
by Jacob Helberg
Published 11 Oct 2021

In a survey by the Center for a New American Security, nearly 80 percent of top Silicon Valley executives considered the relationship between Silicon Valley and the Pentagon to be “poor” or “very poor.”40 The survey came out just a month after Beijing implemented its National Intelligence Law, the one requiring “any organization or citizen” to “assist and cooperate with the state intelligence work.” The Chinese government was drawing closer to its tech companies at the very moment that relationships in the United States were falling apart. The Marine Serves; The CEO Walks In 1996, John Perry Barlow, an Internet activist and onetime Grateful Dead lyricist, penned a Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace. “Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind,” Barlow wrote. “On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone.

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Now it’s preparing to clash with Big Tech,” Washington Post, July 27, 2020, https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/07/27/congress-tech-hearing/. 40 Loren DeJonge Schulman, Alexandra Sander, and Madeline Christian, “The Rocky Relationship Between Washington and Silicon Valley,” Copia, https://copia.is/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/COPIA-CNAS-Rocky-Relationship-Between-Washington-And-Silicon-Valley.pdf. 41 John Perry Barlow, “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace,” Electronic Frontier Foundation, February 8, 1996, https://www.eff.org/cyberspace-independence. 42 Amy Zegart and Kevin Childs, “The Divide Between Silicon Valley and Washington Is a National Security Threat,” The Atlantic, December 13, 2018, https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/12/growing-gulf-between-silicon-valley-and-washington/577963/. 43 Angus Loten, “Older IT Workers Left Out Despite Tech Talent Shortage,” Wall Street Journal, November 25, 2019, https://www.wsj.com/articles/older-it-workers-left-out-despite-tech-talent-shortage-11574683200?

The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom
by Evgeny Morozov
Published 16 Nov 2010

A month later, the Russian government announced that it, too, was considering giving every citizen a government-run email account, if only to make it easier to identify them when they deal with the increasingly electronic government. As already noted, Russian politicians have also been seriously considering creating a government-run search engine, to challenge Google’s rapid growth in the country; according to Russian media, $100 million has been disbursed for that purpose. John Perry Barlow, a cyber-utopian former lyricist of the Grateful Dead, who in 1996 wrote “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace,” a libertarian manifesto for the digital age, likes to point out that “in cyberspace, the First Amendment is a local ordinance.” This, however, may have been just a temporary equilibrium that could soon go away as other foreign governments discover that they would rather not have America own key parts of the infrastructure of the information society.

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J. “Super Wicked Problems and Climate Change: Restraining the Present to Liberate the Future.” Cornell Law Review 94, no. 5 (2009). Lessnoff, M. “The Political Philosophy of Karl Popper.” British Journal of Political Science 10, no. 1 (1980): 99-120. Morrison, A. H. “An Impossible Future: John Perry Barlow’s ‘Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace.’” New Media & Society 11, no. 1-2 (2009): 53. Norman, D. A. “Affordance, Conventions, and Design.” Interactions 6, no. 3 (1999): 38-43. Oliver, M. “The Problem with Affordance.” E-Learning and Digital Media 2, no. 4 (2005): 402-413. O’Loughlin, B.

Like, Comment, Subscribe: Inside YouTube's Chaotic Rise to World Domination
by Mark Bergen
Published 5 Sep 2022

Few knew the DMCA like Fred von Lohmann. He had worked on one of its first prominent cases, defending Yahoo in a lawsuit over bootleg video game sales on its site. (Yahoo won.) Now he was a copyright gun for hire for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, or EFF, a prominent Silicon Valley civil liberties group. One of its founders, John Perry Barlow, an eccentric former lyricist for the Grateful Dead, railed against government and corporate attempts to rein in the web. In a 1994 essay Barlow predicted the internet’s coming ubiquity and laid out the philosophy that would define Silicon Valley: Once that has happened, all the goods of the Information Age—all of the expressions once contained in books or film strips or newsletters—will exist either as pure thought or something very much like thought: voltage conditions darting around the Net at the speed of light, in conditions that one might behold in effect, as glowing pixels or transmitted sounds, but never touch or claim to “own” in the old sense of the word.

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After the NBC fracas, Schaffer’s dad joked that one son would make a video on Saturday and the other would delete it on Monday. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT had recently run an article: Brad Stone, “Video Napster?,” Newsweek, February 28, 2006, https://www.newsweek.com/video-napster-113493. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT a 1994 essay: John Perry Barlow, “The Economy of Ideas,” Wired, March 1, 1994, https://www.wired.com/1994/03/economy-ideas/. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT go viral and spread: Wong would write a college thesis on this subject. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT Wired would write: Joshua Davis, “The Secret World of Lonelygirl,” Wired, December 1, 2006, https://www.wired.com/2006/12/lonelygirl/.

The People vs Tech: How the Internet Is Killing Democracy (And How We Save It)
by Jamie Bartlett
Published 4 Apr 2018

The fundamental features of digital tech are at odds with this model: non-geographical, decentralised, data-driven, subject to network effects and exponential growth. Put simply: democracy wasn’t designed for this. That’s not really anyone’s fault, not even Mark Zuckerberg’s. I’m hardly alone in thinking this, by the way. Many early digital pioneers saw how what they called ‘cyberspace’ was mismatched with the physical world, too. John Perry Barlow’s oft-quoted 1996 Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace sums up this tension rather well: ‘Governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. You have neither solicited nor received ours. We did not invite you. You do not know us, nor do you know our world . . . Your legal concepts of property, expression, identity, movement and context do not apply to us.

100 Things We've Lost to the Internet
by Pamela Paul
Published 14 Oct 2021

It was supposed to allow people to show who they really were or, under the cloak of anonymity, to break free from who others expected them to be. The Internet was meant for strangers to exchange freely with one another and in good faith. In a speech at Davos in 1996, the late poet and cyberactivist John Perry Barlow said, “We are creating a world that all may enter without privilege or prejudice accorded by race, economic power, military force, or station of birth. We are creating a world where anyone, anywhere may express his or her beliefs, no matter how singular, without fear of being coerced into silence or conformity.”

Team Human
by Douglas Rushkoff
Published 22 Jan 2019

Study after study has shown that human beings cannot multitask Clifford Nass, “Cognitive Control in Media Multitaskers,” Pro­ceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 106, no. 27 (September 15, 2009). 39. The digital media environment expresses itself in the physical environment Richard Maxwell and Toby Miller, Greening the Media (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). 40. National governments were declared extinct John Perry Barlow, “Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace,” Wired, February 8, 1996. We are not advancing toward some new, totally inclusive global society, but retreating back to nativism Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994). Even 9/11 was a simultaneously experienced, global event Jean-Marie Colombani, “Nous Sommes Tous Américains,” Le Monde, September 12, 2001.

Terms of Service: Social Media and the Price of Constant Connection
by Jacob Silverman
Published 17 Mar 2015

It’s a vision that’s been cultivated over decades and that has a very real effect on the types of products and digital environments these companies create, from the personal chauffeurs of Uber to the parlous world of online influence. Here users are guests of the benevolent technocratic elite, the digital overlords creating our brave new future and allowing us to visit and enjoy the view for the price of privacy and personal data. In an influential manifesto titled “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace,” John Perry Barlow, the Grateful Dead lyricist-turned-cyber-libertarian activist, told governments that they weren’t welcome in the new online world. This was 1996, the time of the Microsoft-Netscape browser war, the early years of the tech bubble, and the rise of search engines, which helped us unlock the plenitude of the World Wide Web.

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Oct. 19, 2013. cnet.com/8301-1023_3-57608320-93/a-radical-dream-for-making-techno-utopias-a-reality. 250 “without having to deploy them”: Claire Cain Miller. “Larry Page Gets Personal at Google’s Conference.” Bits, a blog on NYTimes.com. May 15, 2013. bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/05/15/larry-page-gets-personal-at-googles-conference. 251 “a public construction project”: John Perry Barlow. “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace.” Electronic Frontier Foundation. Feb. 8, 1996. projects.eff.org/~barlow/Declaration-Final.html. 254 “at no cost”: ibid. 255 Amazon pulls 1984: Brad Stone. “Amazon Erases Orwell Books from Kindle.” New York Times. July 17, 2009. nytimes.com/2009/07/18/technology/companies/18amazon.html. 256 Zuckerberg’s color-blindness: Jose Antonio Vargas.

Dark Mirror: Edward Snowden and the Surveillance State
by Barton Gellman
Published 20 May 2020

Many of the methods I commended to Poitras had their origins with the cypherpunks of the 1990s, a liberty-minded (and therefore leaderless) collective of visionaries and technologists. In the infancy of the internet, the cypherpunks set out to protect it from censorship, surveillance, and other forms of untoward state control. One of them, John Perry Barlow, a former Grateful Dead lyricist and cofounder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, wrote a declaration of independence, warning governments at large (“you weary giants of flesh and steel”) that “you are not welcome among us.” In “A Cypherpunk’s Manifesto,” Eric Hughes announced an action plan: “We know that someone has to write software to defend privacy, and since we can’t get privacy unless we all do, we’re going to write it.”

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I also sent one of the occasional blog posts I wrote for Time online, “The Case of the Stolen Laptop: How to Encrypt, and Why,” Techland, August 6, 2010, http://ti.me/1Qjdu5f. the cypherpunks of the 1990s: See Steven Levy, Crypto: How the Code Rebels Beat the Government, Saving Privacy in the Digital Age (New York: Viking, 2001). See also Eric Hughes, “A Cypherpunk’s Manifesto” (1993), www.activism.net/cypherpunk/manifesto.html; and John Perry Barlow, “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace,” Electronic Frontier Foundation, February 8, 1996, www.eff.org/cyberspace-independence. invented “onion routing”: Among the seminal papers by Naval Research Laboratory employees was David Goldschlag, Michael Reed, and Paul Syverson, “Onion Routing for Anonymous and Private Internet Connections,” Communications of the Association for Computing Machinery, January 28, 1999, www.onion-router.net/Publications/CACM-1999.pdf.

If Then: How Simulmatics Corporation Invented the Future
by Jill Lepore
Published 14 Sep 2020

“The meaning of freedom, structures of self-government, definition of property, nature of competition, conditions for cooperation, sense of community and nature of progress will each be redefined for the Knowledge Age,” the new Magna Carta read, in lines that could have been written by Pool.57 Pool’s work equally informed the 1996 “Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace,” drafted by another leading counterculture figure, John Perry Barlow, a former lyricist for the Grateful Dead. “We are creating a world where anyone, anywhere may express his or her beliefs, no matter how singular, without fear of being coerced into silence or conformity,” Barlow wrote.58 And, most lastingly, Pool’s argument for treating the emerging Internet as a “technology of freedom” formed the underlying logic of the 1996 Telecommunications Act, under whose terms earlier campaigns to treat the Internet the way the federal government treated radio—as a regulated public utility—were abandoned.

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Ibid., 33. Ibid., 183–84, 222–32. Stewart Brand, “We Owe It All to the Hippies,” Time, March 1, 1995. Esther Dyson, George Gilder, George Keyworth, and Alvin Toffler, Cyberspace and the American Dream: A Magna Carta for the Knowledge Age (Progress and Freedom Foundation, 1994). John Perry Barlow, “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace,” February 8, 1996. IP, Questionnaire, undated, Pool Papers, Box 59, Folder “Contact Nets Diary.” John McPhee, “Link with Local History Lost,” Alamogordo [NM] Daily News, April 10, 1998. Wendy McPhee, interview with the author, July 16, 2018.

Digital Empires: The Global Battle to Regulate Technology
by Anu Bradford
Published 25 Sep 2023

Markets Outperform Government Regulation The early internet pioneers in California took an extreme view against regulation, arguing that regulation was both undesirable and unfeasible. According to this view, the internet should be a self-ordering space that writes its own rules without government interference. Only when left alone can the internet deliver its full potential. At the 1996 World Economic Forum meeting in Davos, John Perry Barlow, the founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, published “A Declaration of the Independence of the Cyberspace,” which captured the core tenet of the internet freedom agenda.16 In the Declaration, Barlow declares the cyberspace to be its own “global social space” that is independent from government “tyranny.”

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See Kaye, Speech Police, supra note 9, at 59. 12.Reyhan Harmanci, Tech Confessional: The Googler Who Looked at the Worst of the Internet, Buzzfeed News (Aug. 21, 2012), https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/reyhan/tech-confessional-the-googler-who-looks-at-the-wo. 13.See Bobby Allyn, In Settlement, Facebook to Pay $52 Million to Content Moderators with PTSD, NPR (May 12, 2020), https://www.npr.org/2020/05/12/854998616/in-settlement-facebook-to-pay-52-million-to-content-moderators-with-ptsd. 14.John Perry Barlow, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Elec. Frontier Found. (Feb. 8, 1996), https://www.eff.org/cyberspace-independence. 15.See Zuboff, supra note 2. 16.Adrian Chen, Cambridge Analytica and Our Lives Inside the Surveillance Machine, The N. Yorker (Mar. 21, 2018), https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/cambridge-analytica-and-our-lives-inside-the-surveillance-machine. 17.Daniel Susser, Beate Roessler, and Helen Nissenbaum, Technology, Autonomy, and Manipulation, 8 Internet Pol’y Rev. 1, 2–3 (2019). 18.Ross Andersen, The Panopticon Is Already Here, Atl.

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World Affs. 55, 56 (2010). 8.Amy Lynne Bomse, The Dependence of Cyberspace, 50 Duke L.J. 1717, 1726 (2001). 9.See, e.g., Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets (2006); About EFF, Electronic Frontier Foundation, https://www.eff.org/about. 10.Barbrook & Cameron, supra note 5, at 52–53. 11.Bomse, supra note 8, at 1726. 12.Alistair S. Duff, Rating the Revolution: Silicon Valley in Normative Perspective, 19 Info., Commc’n & Soc’y 1605, 1606 (2016). 13.Id. at 1615. 14.Kai Fu Lee, AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley and the New World Order 26–28 (2019). 15.Duff, supra note 12, at 1613. 16.John Perry Barlow, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Electronic Frontier Foundation (Feb. 8, 1996), https://www.eff.org/cyberspace-independence. 17.See e.g., generally David R. Johnson & David Post, Law and Borders: The Rise of Law in Cyberspace, 48 Stan. L. Rev. 1367, 1376 (1996) [hereinafter: Johnson & Post, Law and Borders]. 18.Ira Magaziner, Creating a Framework for Global Electronic Commerce, The Progress & Freedom Foundation (July 1999), http://www.pff.org/issues-pubs/futureinsights/fi6.1globaleconomiccommerce.html [hereinafter: Magaziner, Framework]. 19.Clinton’s Words on China: Trade Is the Smart Thing, N.Y.

America at the Crossroads: Democracy, Power, and the Neoconservative Legacy
by Francis Fukuyama
Published 20 Mar 2007

Many feel that these developments could have emerged only in a freewheeling, competitive capitalist order with minimal government interference in private markets. There is a distinctively American form of techno-libertarianism that translates traditional American antistatism into a modern high-tech setting, exemplified by John Perry Barlow and the Electronic Frontier Foundation that he helped found. 12 The view that the American information technology industry owed its success to the absence of government intervention is only partially correct. Most of the major American technological advances of the late twentieth century were stimulated by government encouragement and investment. 13 But there was enough truth in the techno-libertarian view to convince many Americans that their particular mix of market and state represented the wave of the future.

Company: A Short History of a Revolutionary Idea
by John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge
Published 4 Mar 2003

It was no coincidence that the main corporate heroes of the period all hailed from a place famous for small, agile firms—the thin sliver of land between San Jose and San Francisco that had once been known as the Valley of Heart’s Delight. SILICON VALLEY In 1996, with the Internet revolution gathering pace, John Perry Barlow, a Grateful Dead songwriter and cyber guru, issued the following warning: “Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of the Mind. I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us.” Silicon Valley’s penchant for hyperbole can be grating.

Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires
by Douglas Rushkoff
Published 7 Sep 2022

Chapter 2: Mergers and Acquisitions   25   Tech companies actively sought : Douglas Rushkoff, Cyberia: Life in the Trenches of Hyperspace (New York: HarperOne, 1994).   25   “new communalists” : Fred Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006).   26   Operation Sundevil : Bruce Sterling, The Hacker Crackdown: Law and Disorder on the Electronic Frontier (New York: Bantam, 1992).   26   “Governments of the Industrial World” : John Perry Barlow, “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace,” Electronic Frontier Foundation, 1996, https:// www .eff .org /cyberspace -independence.   26   fungus and bacteria : Qi Hui Sam, Matthew Wook Chang, and Louis Yi Ann Chai, “The Fungal Mycobiome and Its Interaction with Gut Bacteria in the Host,” International Journal of Molecular Sciences , February 4, 2017, https:// www .ncbi .nlm .nih .gov /pmc /articles /PMC5343866 /.   28   extolled the virtues of the deal : Saul Hansell, “America Online Agrees to Buy Time Warner for $165 Billion; Media Deal is Richest Merger,” New York Times , January 11, 2000, https:// www .nytimes .com /2000 /01 /11 /business /media -megadeal -overview -america -online -agrees -buy -time -warner -for -165 -billion .html.   28   the piece I wrote placed in the Guardian : Douglas Rushkoff, “Why Time Is Up for Warner,” Guardian , January 20, 2000, https:// www .theguardian .com /technology /2000 /jan /20 /onlinesupplement10.   29   People blamed : Seth Stevenson, “The Believer,” New York Magazine , July 6, 2007, https:// nymag .com /news /features /34454 /.   30   hired investment bank Salomon Smith Barney : Tim Arango, “How the AOL–Time Warner Merger Went So Wrong,” New York Times , January 10, 2010, https:// www .nytimes .com /2010 /01 /11 /business /media /11merger .html.   31   probably borrowed : Steven Levy, Facebook: The Inside Story (New York: Blue Rider Press, 2020).   32   stocks quadruple : Lisa Pham, “This Company Added the Word ‘Blockchain’ to Its Name and Saw Its Shares Surge 394%,” Bloomberg , October 27, 2017, https:// www .bloomberg .com /news /articles /2017 -10 -27 /what -s -in -a -name -u -k -stock -surges -394 -on -blockchain -rebrand.   33   “independent, host-led local organizations” : Dave Lee, “Airbnb Using ‘Independent’ Host Groups to Lobby Policymakers,” Financial Times , March 21, 2021, https:// www .ft .com /content /1afb3173 -444a -47fa -99ec -554779dde236.   33   Google was outspending : Shaban Hamza, “Google for the First Time Outspent Every Other Company to Influence Washington in 2017,” Washington Post , January 23, 2018, https:// www .washingtonpost .com /news /the -switch /wp /2018 /01 /23 /google -outspent -every -other -company -on -federal -lobbying -in -2017 /.   33   outspent by Facebook : Lauren Feiner, “Facebook Spent More on Lobbying than Any Other Big Tech Company in 2020,” CNBC , January 22, 2021, https:// www .cnbc .com /2021 /01 /22 /facebook -spent -more -on -lobbying -than -any -other -big -tech -company -in -2020 .html.   33   Numerous studies : Martin Gilens and Benjamin I.

You Are Not a Gadget
by Jaron Lanier
Published 12 Jan 2010

Would they become trapped in it, unable to escape back to the physical world where the rest of us live? Some of the questions were silly, and others were prescient. How Politics Influences Information Technology I was part of a merry band of idealists back then. If you had dropped in on, say, me and John Perry Barlow, who would become a cofounder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, or Kevin Kelly, who would become the founding editor of Wired magazine, for lunch in the 1980s, these are the sorts of ideas we were bouncing around and arguing about. Ideals are important in the world of technology, but the mechanism by which ideals influence events is different than in other spheres of life.

Silicon City: San Francisco in the Long Shadow of the Valley
by Cary McClelland
Published 8 Oct 2018

“Sasha makes something new, we try it, we go to bed, we make love. In the morning, we have a big bowl of soup and talk about it.” But you go to Brazil, and an Indian in a jungle is having similar visions. Drinking ayahuasca is like plugging into the umbilical cord of the planet. Realms that we don’t know how to navigate until people experiment, try. John Perry Barlow. He was such a cowboy—so cool and fun—you couldn’t resist that. He founded the Electronic Frontier Foundation, with John Gilmore and Mitch Kapor, because he didn’t want the government to run away with this new technology. He thought technology should be free. He was never afraid of speaking the truth or confronting “givens.”

Insanely Great: The Life and Times of Macintosh, the Computer That Changed Everything
by Steven Levy
Published 2 Feb 1994

In the age of computers, the best science fiction writers are no longer speculative prophets, but interpreters of a newly synthesized reality, constructed of mathematics and information. Thus it appears that instead of inventing cyberspace, Gibson identified it. It had been there, we now understand, for years. Cyberspace, says essayist and lyricist John Perry Barlow, is where conversations are conducted when two people talk on the telephone. But most often it is associated with a landscape of data. Or as Michael Benedikt, an architecture professor, described C-space, "The tablet become a page become a screen become a world, a virtual world. Its depths increase with every image and word or number, with every addition, every contribution, of fact or thought.

Owning the Earth: The Transforming History of Land Ownership
by Andro Linklater
Published 12 Nov 2013

With TRIPS, the idea of private exclusive property that first appeared in relation to land in sixteenth-century England could be said to have conquered the world. However, in the very year that the TRIPS agreement dispersed this system around the globe, the central edifice of intellectual rights threatened to evaporate through the even faster expansion of digitized information across the World Wide Web. In a prescient article written in 1994, John Perry Barlow, Grateful Dead lyricist and cofounder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, warned of the impact of being able to express all information in binary form: “If our property can be infinitely reproduced and instantaneously distributed all over the planet without cost, without our knowledge, without its even leaving our possession, how can we protect it?”

…

the Uruguay round of trade agreements: For the effect of TRIPS on communal and traditional medical knowledge, see “Native medicines—who should profit?,” New Scientist 181, issue 2436 (February 28, 2004), 15. In a prescient article: “The Economy of Ideas: A framework for patents and copyrights in the Digital Age” by John Perry Barlow. Wired, Mar. 1994. “cancerous” and “unAmerican”: Microsoft’s epithets are quoted in an interview with Linus Torvals in “Linux succeeded thanks to selfishness and trust,” by Leo Kelion, New York Times, June 13, 2012. “There is no enterprise”: Henry Dawes made his comment to the Senate in 1883.

The (Honest) Truth About Dishonesty: How We Lie to Everyone, Especially Ourselves
by Dan Ariely
Published 27 Jun 2012

There’s one way to find out if a man is honest—ask him. If he says “yes,” he is a crook. —GROUCHO MARX My interest in cheating was first ignited in 2002, just a few months after the collapse of Enron. I was spending the week at some technology-related conference, and one night over drinks I got to meet John Perry Barlow. I knew John as the erstwhile lyricist for the Grateful Dead, but during our chat I discovered that he had also been working as a consultant for a few companies—including Enron. In case you weren’t paying attention in 2001, the basic story of the fall of the Wall Street darling went something like this: Through a series of creative accounting tricks—helped along by the blind eye of consultants, rating agencies, the company’s board, and the now-defunct accounting firm Arthur Andersen, Enron rose to great financial heights only to come crashing down when its actions could no longer be concealed.

Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism
by Safiya Umoja Noble
Published 8 Jan 2018

Challenging Cybertopias All of this leads to more discussion about ideologies that serve to stabilize and normalize the notion of commercial search, including the still-popular and ever-persistent dominant narratives about the neutrality and objectivity of the Internet itself—beyond Google and beyond utopian visions of computer software and hardware. The early cybertarian John Perry Barlow’s infamous “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace” argued in part, “We are creating a world that all may enter without privilege or prejudice accorded by race, economic power, military force, or station of birth. We are creating a world where anyone, anywhere may express his or her beliefs, no matter how singular, without fear of being coerced into silence or conformity.”93 Yet the web is not only an intangible space; it is also a physical space made of brick, mortar, metal trailers, electronics containing magnetic and optical media, and fiber infrastructure.

Age of the City: Why Our Future Will Be Won or Lost Together
by Ian Goldin and Tom Lee-Devlin
Published 21 Jun 2023

In 1993, the writer Howard Rheingold published The Virtual Community, in which he described with breathless enthusiasm the emergence of The WELL – short for Whole Earth ’Lectronic Link – a type of embryonic social network that allowed members to connect with one another over the internet and build shared interest groups. In 1996, journalist and cyber optimist John Perry Barlow published his Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, in which he described his vision for the internet as ‘a world that all may enter without privilege or prejudice accorded to race, economic power, military force, or station of birth … where anyone, anywhere may express his or her beliefs, no matter how singular, without fear of being coerced into silence or conformity’.1 The fact that key figures like Stewart Brand, who founded The WELL, were also central participants in the 1960s counterculture, with its egalitarian and universalist ethos, helps explain some of this utopian hyperbole.

Free Speech: Ten Principles for a Connected World
by Timothy Garton Ash
Published 23 May 2016

‘Cyberspace’ is a word coined by the science fiction writer William Gibson in a short story published in 1982 (‘Burning Chrome’) and subsequently used in his novel Neuromancer. In the 1990s, as science fiction seemed to be becoming fact, American cyberlibertarian hopes for a global newfoundland of freedom soared to giddy heights. John Perry Barlow, a passionate advocate for internet freedom and former lyricist of the rock band the Grateful Dead, produced in 1996 a Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, with obvious echoes of the 1776 Declaration of Independence. It even denounced ‘hostile and colonial measures’, as if King George III were about to dispatch his redcoats into cyberspace.

…

The cyberlaw expert Tim Wu is credited with coining the term; see Wu 2003. Listen to his discussion of it on ‘Wu on His Phrase “Net Neutrality”’, Free Speech Debate, http://freespeechdebate.com/en/media/net-neutrality-by-the-man-who-coined-the-phrase/, and see the introduction on his website at http://perma.cc/4Z5P-RP4C 55. dated 8 February 1996; John Perry Barlow, ‘A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace’, http://perma.cc/V8VS-XHZD 56. full detail in Mueller 2004 and Mueller 2012 57. a useful account of the history is given on Wikipedia: http://perma.cc/Q36Q-366E 58. see several contributions to Levmore et al., eds. 2010 and Sunstein 2009, 83 59.

How to Speak Money: What the Money People Say--And What It Really Means
by John Lanchester
Published 5 Oct 2014

That is bullshit, and relatively harmless—I say “relatively” rather than “wholly” because once you’ve fallen for the line, and then seen through it, it tends to diminish your trust in Big Issue sellers. The “hype cycle” around new inventions involves a near-ritualized early period of puffing, boosterism, and bullshit: as John Perry Barlow, songwriter for the Grateful Dead, once brilliantly put it, “bullshit is the grease for the skids on which we ride into the future.” (I like that line because it is both an example of bullshit and a great explanation of it.) There is an enormous amount of bullshit in the world of money. Nonsense is different: it’s worse.

Rethinking Money: How New Currencies Turn Scarcity Into Prosperity
by Bernard Lietaer and Jacqui Dunne
Published 4 Feb 2013

Additionally, governments are learning that affording greater opportunities to their citizens bodes well for society and avoids the circumstances that give rise to civil unrest and turmoil. So what are the design features that bode well for a sustainable currency strategy? Chapter Eleven GOVERNANCE AND WE, THE CITIZENS An Ancient Future? The economy of the future is based on relationships rather than possessions. John Perry Barlow, former lyricist for the Grateful Dead and founding member of the Electronic Frontier Foundation Bali is a small island in the Indonesian archipelago that fervently embraces and preserves its Hindu culture, though it is situated in a huge, mostly Islamic nation. What makes Bali compelling is the longevity of its complex cooperative currency system, which is inextricably interwoven with its cultivation of rice, allocation of vital water rights, celebrations of festivals, and hyperdemocratic system of governance.

Lab Rats: How Silicon Valley Made Work Miserable for the Rest of Us
by Dan Lyons
Published 22 Oct 2018

Jobs was an LSD-taking, commune-dwelling hippie who often went barefoot and who was influenced by Stewart Brand, a proponent of psychedelic drugs who hung out with Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters. Brand created the Whole Earth Catalog and co-founded the WELL, one of the first online communities. Its members included John Perry Barlow, who wrote lyrics for the Grateful Dead and co-founded the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an Internet civil liberties advocacy organization. Counterculture values—freedom, personal liberation, civil rights, respect for the individual—shaped the culture of Silicon Valley. My first encounter with the old version of Silicon Valley came in the late 1980s, when I visited a software company in Santa Cruz where bearded, long-haired engineers wore shorts and tie-dyed shirts and spent evenings lounging in a huge redwood hot tub, drinking wine and smoking pot.

The Future of Capitalism: Facing the New Anxieties
by Paul Collier
Published 4 Dec 2018

I learned much, some of which will be reflected in later notes, but I was relieved to find that Smith will not be turning in his grave at my account of his ideas. 4.Norman (2018). 5.Towers et al. (2016). 6.This was the disagreement between Hume and Kant. 7.Haidt (2012). 8.Mercier and Sperber (2017). 9.Gamble et al. (2018). 10.The Leninist concept of ‘democratic’ centralism. 11.As Haidt (2012) remarks, ‘Deontology and Utilitarianism are “one receptor” moralities, appealing to people with a lack of empathy.’ 12.See Dijksterhuis (2005), and Christakis and Fowler (2009). 13.See Hood (2014). 14.See Thomas et al. (2014). 15.See, for example, Cialdini (2007). 16.Akerlof and Shiller (2009), p. 54. 17.Mueller and Rauh (2017). 18.On taboos see Bénabou and Tirole (2011). 19.I have set these ideas out more fully in Collier (2016). 20.A good introduction is their book Identity Economics, Akerlof and Kranton (2011). 21.Besley (2016). 22.If you are interested in the details, I have recently surveyed this new literature: Collier (2017). 23.World Happiness Report, 2017. 24.The sentiments are those of John Perry Barlow and Mark Zuckerberg, respectively. 25.The technical term is homology. 26.As argued in the seminal study by MacIntyre in 1981, the essence of moral language is to treat others not just as means to a self-interested end, but rather as ends in themselves. See MacIntyre (2013). 27.I have explained shared identity, reciprocity and purposive actions as an analytic sequence, but the empirical evidence that the three components are jointly necessary for ethical collective behaviour comes from the work of Nobel Laureate Eleanor Ostrom (1990) and her successors. 28.For a fuller discussion of the underlying theory and evidence, see Collier (2018d). 29.A phenomenon known as the political business cycle; Chauvet and Collier (2009). 30.Putnam (2016), p. 221. 3.

Artificial Unintelligence: How Computers Misunderstand the World
by Meredith Broussard
Published 19 Apr 2018

Computers are so much more rule-based, controllable, fixable, and comprehensible than any human will ever be.”20 This is Turing’s social awkwardness, politicized and magnified. The transition from hippie ideology to the antigovernment ideology of cyberspace activists is visible in “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace,” published in 1996 by former Grateful Dead lyricist John Perry Barlow. “Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind,” Barlow writes. “On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone … You have no sovereignty where we gather. We have no elected government, nor are we likely to have one.”21 Barlow started the libertarian Electronic Frontier Foundation, which today defends hackers, because of debates he had on the WELL.

After the Gig: How the Sharing Economy Got Hijacked and How to Win It Back
by Juliet Schor , William Attwood-Charles and Mehmet Cansoy
Published 15 Mar 2020

It represents the combination of hippie counterculture and technophilia and the view that digital technology was the route to a society free of domination. See also Turner (2006); and Thomas Frank (2000). 8. Turner (2006, 208) takes issue with Barbrook and Cameron’s claim that the Californian Ideology emerged from the New Left. He argues its origins were Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth network and New Communalism. 9. Tech pioneers such as John Perry Barlow (former lyricist for the Grateful Dead), Esther Dyson, and others embarked on lucrative tech-enabled careers themselves and preached the gospel of network-based financial independence. 10. The Jeffersonian vision is discussed by Barbrook and Cameron (1996). Early social networking sites populated by techno-counterculturalists did produce largely harmonious social worlds.

Other Pandemic: How QAnon Contaminated the World
by James Ball
Published 19 Jul 2023

Anything worth more than £25 that you absolutely couldn’t refuse went into an annual ‘sleaze lottery’ at Christmas, with the proceeds going to the Guardian’s charity of the year. 15. Michael McWhertor, ‘Game developer Brianna Wu flees home after death threats, Mass. police investigating’, www.polygon.com, 11 October 2014. 16. Alex Hern, ‘Gamergate hits new low with attempts to send Swat teams to critics’, www.theguardian.com, 13 January 2015. 17. John Perry Barlow’s Declaration of Independence of cyberspace is a seminal document on this: www.eff.org/cyberspace-independence. 18. Angela Nagle, Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars from 4chan and Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-Right (Zer0 Books, 2017), pp. 8 and 10. 19. Zaid Jilani, ‘Gamergate’s fickle hero: The dark opportunism of Breitbart’s Milo Yiannopoulos’, www.salon.com, 28 October 2014. 20.

How to Fix Copyright
by William Patry
Published 3 Jan 2012

The rapid pace of technological innovation brought about by the Internet and digital tools has radically collapsed the time lines for businesses to adapt and therefore for laws that seek to regulate business issues arising from the Internet. Static laws that attempt to establish for all time the rules governing technological and market innovation will impede that innovation. This doesn’t mean the Internet should be without regulation as John Perry Barlow argued in his 1996 “Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace.”25 But it does mean that the nature of the Internet must be taken into account: policymakers cannot pass stronger versions of laws founded on the early eighteenth-century London book industry and expect them to be effective for twenty-first-century markets and technology.

What Would Google Do?
by Jeff Jarvis
Published 15 Feb 2009

Generation G will have a different sense of membership, loyalty, patriotism, and power. They will belong to new nations: a nation of geeks, a nation of diabetics, a nation of artists. They may feel greater allegiances to these nations and less to their town or country. Hear the Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace by John Perry Barlow, former Grateful Dead lyricist and a founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, from 1999: “Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us.

Made to Break: Technology and Obsolescence in America
by Giles Slade
Published 14 Apr 2006

[They] have become an integral part of the fabric of American life, changing the way we think, the way we learn, and the way we see the future.”66 Nolan Bushnell, the founder of Atari, agrees and offers an informed description of the new consciousness shared and enjoyed by our gaming children: “In the future, in part, we will be living in virtual reality . . . To survive and make it in that dimension, we are going to have to be mentally awake. We are going to have to live and be comfortable and maneuver in a computer environment. These kids are in training.” John Perry Barlow, founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, puts it slightly differently. He refers to the emerging generation of gamers as the new “natives” of cyberspace.67 NSC Officia Gus Weiss used [the Farewell] . . . material to design a massive deception program . . . unparalleled in the cold War.

Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations
by Clay Shirky
Published 28 Feb 2008

Second, he recognized that treating the internet as some sort of separate space—cyberspace, as it was often called—was part of the problem. That word, coined by William Gibson in his novel Neuromancer, refers to a kind of alternate reality mediated by the world’s communications networks. The cyberspace of Neuromancer is a visual representation of all the world’s data; John Perry Barlow, a digital rights activist, later used the word to refer to the social spaces of the internet. Whether visual or social, though, the basic sense of cyberspace was that it was a world separate and apart from the real world. The predicted end point of this process was a progressive disassociation of social life from real space, leading to the death of cities as the population spread out to more bucolic spots.

Everything for Everyone: The Radical Tradition That Is Shaping the Next Economy
by Nathan Schneider
Published 10 Sep 2018

At bottom, as with lords past, these lords depend on everyone else’s respect for their ownership claims—over warehouses full of whirring servers, over proprietary algorithms, over rights backed by the force of governments and treaties. The tech industry has long sought to claim otherwise. John Perry Barlow’s 1996 “Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace” asserted on behalf of the internet that the industrial world’s notions of property and control no longer apply. “They are all based on matter,” he wrote, “and there is no matter here.” The Silicon Valley culture for which Barlow served as a prophet enacts this claim in the user experiences its companies design.

Britain Etc
by Mark Easton
Published 1 Mar 2012

The Internet could be the ultimate isolating technology that reduces our participation in communities even more than did automobiles and television before it.’ In Britain, where the web was expanding rapidly, it was noted that the dire warnings of social catastrophe were matched by cyber-evangelists proclaiming the reverse. ‘The most transforming technological event since the capture of fire’ was how John Perry Barlow, lyricist for the Grateful Dead and digital rights activist, described the development of the Internet. The writer Howard Rheingold, one of the first to log on to an online community in San Francisco in the mid-1980s, claimed to have been ‘participating in the self-design of a new kind of culture’.

Utopia Is Creepy: And Other Provocations
by Nicholas Carr
Published 5 Sep 2016

There’s nothing wrong with that view, I suppose—these are all writers who court business audiences—but their writings do testify to just how far we’ve come from the idealism of the early days of cyberspace. Back then, online communities were proudly anticommercial, and the net’s free exchanges stood in opposition to what John Perry Barlow, in his “Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace,” dismissively termed “the Industrial World.” By encouraging us to think of sharing as Collaborative Consumption, the technologies of the web now look like they will have, as their true legacy, the spread of market forces into the most intimate spheres of life.

Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy
by Lawrence Lessig
Published 2 Jan 2009

In perhaps the most dramatic experience of democracy I’ve witnessed, I watched Brazil’s minister of culture, Gilberto Gil, argue with a loving but critical 80706 i-xxiv 001-328 r4nk.indd 66 8/12/08 1:54:52 AM R W, R E V I V ED 67 crowd (loving his music and most of his policies, except the part that protected incumbent radio stations).21 The forum was packed. There was no stage that separated Gil from the hundreds who huddled around to hear him. People argued directly with him. He argued back, equal to equal. The exchange was so honest that it even embarrassed John Perry Barlow, Gil’s friend and fan, who stood to defend Gil against the critics. But Gil loved the exchange. He was not embarrassed by the harshness of the criticism. His manner encouraged it. He was a democratic leader in a real (as opposed to hierarchical) democracy. He was Posner in Brazil. For those of us who are not Posner and not Gil, the Internet is the one context that encourages the ethic of democracy that they exemplify.

Postcapitalism: A Guide to Our Future
by Paul Mason
Published 29 Jul 2015

By the late 1990s, the received wisdom among those who understood the problem was that capitalism would survive because innovation would counteract technology’s downward effect on pricing. But nowhere did Kelly explore what might happen if this failed. Then came the dotcom crash. The spectacular fall of Nasdaq, beginning in April 2000, changed the perception of the generation that had struggled with dial-up modems and got rich. Following the disaster John Perry Barlow, a cyber-rights campaigner who’d lost 95 per cent of his money, drew the harsh conclusion: ‘The whole dot-com thing was an effort to use 19th and 20th century concepts of economy in an environment where they didn’t exist, and the internet essentially shrugged them off. This was an assault by an alien force that was repelled by the natural forces of the internet.’

Predictably Irrational, Revised and Expanded Edition: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions
by Dan Ariely
Published 19 Feb 2007

As we have seen, it can remove the best in human interactions. So do we need money? Of course we do. But could there be some aspects of our life that would be, in some ways, better without it? That’s a radical idea, and not an easy one to imagine. But a few years ago I had a taste of it. At that time, I got a phone call from John Perry Barlow, a former lyricist for the Grateful Dead, inviting me to an event that proved to be both an important personal experience and an interesting exercise in creating a moneyless society. Barlow told me that I had to come to Burning Man with him, and that if I did, I would feel as if I had come home.

The Future of Money
by Bernard Lietaer
Published 28 Apr 2013

CHAPTER 6 Community Currencies · 'Money symbolised the loving giving end taking among individuals which gave man the feeling of having emotional roots in their community [...] Money originated as a symbol of man's soul.' - William S. Desmonde ‘The economy of the future is based on relationships rather than possession.' - John Perry Barlow 'What idealists have dreamt about, What hippies used to talk about, Now people are just doing.' - Anonymous This chapter addresses another ‘money question’ of our TimeCompacting Machine; the one relating to the Age Wave; i.e. 'how will society provide the elderly with the money to match their longevity'' But it also goes beyond that specific topic by tackling the broader issue of community breakdown.

Permanent Record
by Edward Snowden
Published 16 Sep 2019

This was thrilling—to participate in the founding of a new society, one based not on where we were born or how we grew up or our popularity at school but on our knowledge and technological ability. In school, I’d had to memorize the preamble to the U.S. Constitution: now its words were lodged in my memory alongside John Perry Barlow’s “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace,” which employed the same self-evident, self-elect plural pronoun: “We are creating a world that all may enter without privilege or prejudice accorded by race, economic power, military force, or station of birth. We are creating a world where anyone, anywhere may express his or her beliefs, no matter how singular, without fear of being coerced into silence or conformity.”

The Irrational Bundle
by Dan Ariely
Published 3 Apr 2013

As we have seen, it can remove the best in human interactions. So do we need money? Of course we do. But could there be some aspects of our life that would be, in some ways, better without it? That’s a radical idea, and not an easy one to imagine. But a few years ago I had a taste of it. At that time, I got a phone call from John Perry Barlow, a former lyricist for the Grateful Dead, inviting me to an event that proved to be both an important personal experience and an interesting exercise in creating a moneyless society. Barlow told me that I had to come to Burning Man with him, and that if I did, I would feel as if I had come home.

…

There’s one way to find out if a man is honest—ask him. If he says “yes,” he is a crook. —GROUCHO MARX My interest in cheating was first ignited in 2002, just a few months after the collapse of Enron. I was spending the week at some technology-related conference, and one night over drinks I got to meet John Perry Barlow. I knew John as the erstwhile lyricist for the Grateful Dead, but during our chat I discovered that he had also been working as a consultant for a few companies—including Enron. In case you weren’t paying attention in 2001, the basic story of the fall of the Wall Street darling went something like this: Through a series of creative accounting tricks—helped along by the blind eye of consultants, rating agencies, the company’s board, and the now-defunct accounting firm Arthur Andersen, Enron rose to great financial heights only to come crashing down when its actions could no longer be concealed.

Radicals Chasing Utopia: Inside the Rogue Movements Trying to Change the World
by Jamie Bartlett
Published 12 Jun 2017

Back in the 1990s Timothy May imagined a world where virtual regions called ‘cybersteads’, protected by powerful encryption, could be created online, leaving individuals free to make consensual economic arrangements among themselves with no state at all—a world of online communities of interest interacting directly with each other, as the ‘meat world’ of mediocre, inefficient governments watched helplessly on the side. Around the same time, cyberlibertarian (and former Grateful Dead lyricist) John Perry Barlow declared the ‘Independence of Cyberspace’, announcing to the real world that ‘your legal concepts of property, expression, identity, movement, and context do not apply to us… our identities have no bodies, so, unlike you, we cannot obtain order by physical coercion’. Barlow believed that the lack of censorship and the anonymity that the Net seemed to offer would foster a freer, more open society, where tyrannous governments had no power.

The Fugitive Game: Online With Kevin Mitnick
by Jonathan Littman
Published 1 Jan 1996

The same tools... that he took, that he could use perhaps to sniff networks are the same tools that we used to monitor him and to catch him." A reporter asks Shimomura why he chased Mitnick in the first place. "I was asked to do this out of a personal favor by someone at the Well." "Someone at the Well? Who was that?" I ask. "I, uh, Barlow." How bizarre. John Perry Barlow is a legendary libertarian in cyberspace, a Wyoming native famous for his Grateful Dead lyrics and battles for freedom and privacy in cyberspace. Barlow helped found the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a civil rights group that got its start by defending unjustly accused hackers. And Barlow made a name for himself a few years back when he wrote an amusing account of a befuddled FBI agent, clumsily searching for crime on the Internet, who made the mistake of wandering onto his western ranch.

Little Brother
by Cory Doctorow
Published 29 Apr 2008

. &&& Acknowledgments This book owes a tremendous debt to many writers, friends, mentors, and heroes who made it possible. For the hackers and cypherpunks: Bunnie Huang, Seth Schoen, Ed Felten, Alex Halderman, Gweeds, Natalie Jeremijenko, Emmanuel Goldstein, Aaron Swartz For the heroes: Mitch Kapor, John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow, Larry Lessig, Shari Steele, Cindy Cohn, Fred von Lohmann, Jamie Boyle, George Orwell, Abbie Hoffman, Joe Trippi, Bruce Schneier, Ross Dowson, Harry Kopyto, Tim O'Reilly For the writers: Bruce Sterling, Kathe Koja, Scott Westerfeld, Justine Larbalestier, Pat York, Annalee Newitz, Dan Gillmor, Daniel Pinkwater, Kevin Pouslen, Wendy Grossman, Jay Lake, Ben Rosenbaum For the friends: Fiona Romeo, Quinn Norton, Danny O'Brien, Jon Gilbert, danah boyd, Zak Hanna, Emily Hurson, Grad Conn, John Henson, Amanda Foubister, Xeni Jardin, Mark Frauenfelder, David Pescovitz, John Battelle, Karl Levesque, Kate Miles, Neil and Tara-Lee Doctorow, Rael Dornfest, Ken Snider For the mentors: Judy Merril, Roz and Gord Doctorow, Harriet Wolff, Jim Kelly, Damon Knight, Scott Edelman Thank you all for giving me the tools to think and write about these ideas. &&&$ Creative Commons Creative Commons Legal Code Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported CREATIVE COMMONS CORPORATION IS NOT A LAW FIRM AND DOES NOT PROVIDE LEGAL SERVICES.

Dreaming in Code: Two Dozen Programmers, Three Years, 4,732 Bugs, and One Quest for Transcendent Software
by Scott Rosenberg
Published 2 Jan 2006

The transcript from the PBS documentary Triumph of the Nerds, in which Sculley himself reports it, is a relatively primary source: http://www.pbs.org/nerds/part3.htm. Kapor’s estimated $100 million: Business Week, May 30, 1988, p. 92. “It’s important to understand”: David Gans’s interview with Kapor is at http://www.eff.org/Misc/Publications/John_Perry _Barlow/HTML/barlow_and_kapor_in_wired_ interview.htm. “extricating myself from my own success”: Kapor interview in Inc., January 1, 1987. Lotus Agenda: general background on the program is collected at http://home.neo.rr.com/pim/alinks.htm. The program is still available via http://www.bobnewell.net/nucleus/bnewell.php?

Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy: The Story of Anonymous
by Gabriella Coleman
Published 4 Nov 2014

Not only did the usual suspects—like technology-oriented publications and blogs—report on the uprising, but so did most of the major nightly news programs. CNN hosted the digital strategist Nicco Mele, who praised Anonymous during an in-depth interview. In the New York Times, one of the Internet’s original patron saints, John Perry Barlow, cast the Anonymous campaign as “the shot heard round the world—this is Lexington.”8 WikiLeaks and Anonymous seemed like a perfect fit. Anonymous’s DDoS campaign solidified this alliance through a spectacular display of solidarity and support. But, as hinted at before, AnonOps’ decision to intervene came about in a rather convoluted, disorderly manner.

Machines of Loving Grace: The Quest for Common Ground Between Humans and Robots
by John Markoff
Published 24 Aug 2015

What kind of world did that foretell? Perhaps it was the one described in the movie Her, released in 2013, in which a shy guy connects with a female AI. Today, however, it is still unclear whether the emergence of cyberspace is a huge step forward for humanity as described by cyber-utopians such as Grateful Dead lyricist John Perry Barlow in his 1996 Wired manifesto, “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace,” or the much bleaker world described by Sherry Turkle in her book Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other. For Barlow, cyberspace would become a utopian world free from crime and degradation of “meatspace.”

Who Owns the Future?
by Jaron Lanier
Published 6 May 2013

The book contract hung over me, a sword of Damocles suspended from a radio-controlled model helicopter, tracking my every move. You can try to make a joke of endless stress. There was an informal contest among hypertardy deliverers to see who could keep a book contract overdue the longest before having to pay the advance back. Ornette Coleman played for a couple of decades, as did John Perry Barlow. It wasn’t that I was lazy. During the years that I didn’t deliver a book I helped found several startups that went on to become parts of big companies. I became a father, led a multiuniversity research program, released a major-label record, had symphonies commissioned and performed, and played music around the world.

Open Standards and the Digital Age: History, Ideology, and Networks (Cambridge Studies in the Emergence of Global Enterprise)
by Andrew L. Russell
Published 27 Apr 2014

In contrast to these articles that emphasized the porous – and therefore dangerous – borders of the “wide-open Internet,” a student in a fall 1994 MIT course on Ethics and Law on the Electronic Frontier noted that “commercial providers like America Online and Compuserve are beginning to open gateways from their exclusive services to the open Internet.” The implication, as with the articles in Newsday and Fortune, was to identify the Internet as an unruly, uncensored, nonproprietary, and potentially dangerous and disruptive electronic frontier – just as John Perry Barlow would describe it in his influential 1996 cyberlibertarian manifesto, “A Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace.”77 Policy makers in the Clinton administration – led by Vice President Al Gore and Commerce Secretary Ron Brown – picked up on discourses of openness to the Internet in the context of their plans for a National Information Infrastructure.

The Future of Ideas: The Fate of the Commons in a Connected World
by Lawrence Lessig
Published 14 Jul 2001

It is no doubt foolish for anyone to try to pull together such a range of material, but I could never have dared to be so foolish without the patient tutoring of many different people. Among these, I am most grateful to my colleagues at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, including John Gilmore and John Perry Barlow; and the Center for Public Domain, especially Laurie Racine and Bob Young. Jeff Chester of the Center for Media Education and Mark Cooper of the Consumers Union taught me a great deal about media policy and the passion of this struggle. There is a long list of technical experts who have struggled to show me how the network works.

The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads
by Tim Wu
Published 14 May 2016

Unlike our day of always-on Internet, back then one “jacked in” or perhaps passed through the back of the family wardrobe, and under a made-up name entered an entirely different kind of world populated by strangers, one where none of the usual rules applied. “Imagine,” said the cyber-pioneer John Perry Barlow, “discovering a continent so vast that it may have no end to its dimensions…where only children feel completely at home, where the physics is that of thought rather than things, and where everyone is as virtual as the shadows in Plato’s cave.”4 It was pretty cool stuff for the 1990s, intriguing enough to get AOL and the early web its first user base.

Whole Earth: The Many Lives of Stewart Brand
by John Markoff
Published 22 Mar 2022

For this purpose, Brand gradually pulled together a band of fellow travelers including Doug Carlson, Kevin Kelly, Peter Schwartz, Paul Saffo, Brian Eno, Esther Dyson, and Mitchell Kapor, who had founded Lotus Development Corporation, a maker of spreadsheet software. Several years earlier, Kapor and John Perry Barlow (who, in addition to being a Grateful Dead lyricist and a WELL member, was a cattle rancher living in Pinedale, Wyoming) had bonded over the plight of a group of teenagers who had run afoul of the Secret Service for breaking into computers. Several months later, the men met for dinner with Jaron Lanier; Saffo; John Gilmore, a technologist and privacy activist; and Brand.

The Chaos Machine: The Inside Story of How Social Media Rewired Our Minds and Our World
by Max Fisher
Published 5 Sep 2022

Source: Turner: 148. 16 A near-absence of rules: Ibid. 17 “We reject: kings”: “A Cloudy Crystal Ball / Apocalypse Now,” presentation by David Clark, July 1992, to the 24th annual Internet Engineering Task Force conference. 18 A former WELL board member: “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace,” John Perry Barlow, February 8, 1996. Initially circulated to dozens of websites simultaneously, now available at Eff.org/cyberspace-independence. 19 “Our general counsel and CEO”: “Twitter’s Tony Wang: ‘We Are the Free Speech Wing of the Free Speech Party,’” Josh Halliday, The Guardian, March 22, 2012. 20 “the founding ideal”: Levy, Facebook: The Inside Story: 458. 21 While Apple was: This is according to Dave Morin, a former senior engineer at Facebook, as paraphrased in Levy: 149. 22 “We’re kind of fundamentally”: “The Facebook Dilemma,” PBS Frontline, October 29, 2018. 23 a letter to shareholders: “Zuckerberg’s Letter to Investors,” Reuters, February 1, 2012. 24 “There’s this fundamental”: Levy, 7. 25 “The reason we nerds”: Hackers and Painters, Paul Graham, 2004: 9. 26 has said he looks for: “What We Look for in Founders,” Paul Graham, Paulgraham.com, October 2010. 27 “These guys want to”: “What I Did This Summer,” Paul Graham, Paulgraham.com, October 2005. 28 “If you’re less sensitive”: Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future, Peter Thiel and Blake Masters, 2014: 40. 29 “Max Levchin, my co-founder”: Ibid: 122. 30 A pair of videos: Screenshots documenting the incident can be found at “Kenny Glenn Case / Dusty the Cat,” Knowyourmeme.com, September 10, 2011. 31 made it wildly popular: “Media Manipulation and Disinformation Online,” Alice Marwick and Rebecca Lewis, Data & Society, May 2017. 32 “Ultimately,” Christopher Poole: “The Trolls Among Us,” Mattathias Schwartz, New York Times Magazine, August 3, 2008. 33 Adolescents also have: Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst, Robert M.

Computer: A History of the Information Machine
by Martin Campbell-Kelly and Nathan Ensmenger
Published 29 Jul 2013

POLITICS OF THE INTERNET As usage of the Internet greatly broadened with the advent of the World Wide Web, many journalists, politicians, and others have presented it as a transformative technology of freedom and democracy. Organizations such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation, formed in 1990 by Lotus Development founder Mitch Kapor and Grateful Dead lyricist John Perry Barlow, have emerged to defend individual Internet rights—with some such advocates from the political left and many others from the libertarian right. The broadening participation in user-created web content—the defining characteristic of Web 2.0—and the newfound mobile computing of smartphones not only fuel such framings of the Internet but also highlight it as a democratizing tool to help battle authoritarian regimes.

How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence
by Michael Pollan
Published 30 Apr 2018

His first experience with LSD “was kind of a bum trip,” he recalls, but it led to a series of other journeys that reshaped his worldview and, indirectly, all of ours. The Whole Earth Network Brand would subsequently gather together (which included Peter Schwartz, Esther Dyson, Kevin Kelly, Howard Rheingold, and John Perry Barlow) and play a key role in redefining what computers meant and did, helping to transform them from a top-down tool of the military-industrial complex—with the computer punch card a handy symbol of Organization Man—into a tool of personal liberation and virtual community, with a distinctly countercultural vibe.

The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order: America and the World in the Free Market Era
by Gary Gerstle
Published 14 Oct 2022

Zelizer, eds., Media Nation: The Political History of News in Modern America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017), 176-189; Anna Cardoso, “The Rise of the Right-Wing Media and the Repeal of the Fairness Doctrine in the USA” (undergraduate dissertation, University of Cambridge, 2019). 59.See, in particular, Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1922) and The Phantom Public (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1925). 60.On the Fairness doctrine, see Zelizer, “How Washington Helped Create the Contemporary Media,” and Cardoso, “The Rise of the Right-Wing Media and the Repeal of the Fairness Doctrine in the USA.” 61.One of the key promoters of this vision was cyber-utopian (and longtime lyricist for the Grateful Dead) John Perry Barlow. See his “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace,” issued by Electronic Frontier Foundation, February 8, 1996, https://www.eff.org/cyberspace-independence, accessed July 29, 2021. Barlow also wrote frequently for Wired at this time: “Jack In?” Wired, February 1, 1993, https://www.wired.com/1993/02/jack-in/, accessed August 9, 2021; “The Economy of Ideas,” Wired, March 1, 1994, https://www.wired.com/1994/03/economy-ideas/, accessed August 9, 2021; “Jackboots on the Infobahn,” Wired, April 1, 1994, https://www.wired.com/1994/04/privacy-barlow/, accessed August 9, 2021; “Declaring Independence,” Wired, June 1, 1996, https://www.wired.com/1996/06/independence/, accessed August 9, 2021; “The Powers That Were,” Wired, September 1, 1996, https://www.wired.com/1996/09/netizen-10/, accessed August 9, 2021; “The Next Economy of Ideas,” Wired, October 1, 2000, https://www.wired.com/2000/10/download/, accessed August 9, 2021. 62.Aufderheide, Communications Policy and the Public Interest. 63.On the development of the legislation itself and its ambition, see Stiglitz, The Roaring Nineties, 87–114; author’s phone interview with Stiglitz, May 19, 2020. 64.In one column, Kitman wrote, “I felt like the muckraker Ida Tarbell researching her history of the Standard Oil Company in the mid-1890s as I watched the progress of the new Telecommunications Act sailing through the Give-Them-Everything Congress of 1995.”

The Best of 2600: A Hacker Odyssey
by Emmanuel Goldstein
Published 28 Jul 2008

The mass media actually picked up on it. I think that’s when I first saw the power of the Net in action. Emails came pouring in, scores of people wanted to know what they could do, and the word spread throughout the globe. Among those who expressed a desire to help were Lotus founder Mitch Kapor and former Grateful Dead lyricist John Perry Barlow. They saw these events as a reason to start a new group that would help protect people from this kind of injustice. And so, the seeds for the Electronic Frontier Foundation were planted. 94192c13.qxd 6/3/08 3:34 PM Page 493 Hackers and the Law For Your Protection (Spring, 1990) A year ago, we told the stories of Kevin Mitnick and Herbert Zinn, two hackers who had been sent to prison.

…

The Electronic Frontier Foundation, once a proud, principled group dedicated to civil liberties, is now funded completely by corporations such as AT&T, Bell Atlantic, MCI, and IBM. They followed the wishes of their corporate masters and cut a deal, then claimed victory for trivial privacy protections. At the last minute, EFF cofounder John Perry Barlow called Senator Malcolm Wallop, who was planning to kill the bill, and asked him to allow the bill to pass. Barlow said in comments on The Well that he wasn’t proud of what he did but that it “was the price of growing up.” As if selling one’s soul to Satan was a sign of maturity. The FBI told senators’ aides who were concerned about the bill after the public campaign organized by EPIC and Voters Telecom Watch, that “EFF supported the bill so there are no privacy concerns.”

The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom
by Yochai Benkler
Published 14 May 2006

About two-thirds of industry revenues in software development come from activities that the Economic Census describes as: (1) writing, modifying, testing, and supporting software to meet the needs of a particular customer; (2) planning and designing computer systems that integrate computer hardware, software, and communication technologies; (3) on-site management and operation of clients' computer systems and/or data processing facilities; and (4) other professional and technical computer-related advice and services, systems consultants, and computer training. "Software publishing," by contrast, the business model that relies on sales based on copyright, accounts for a little more than one-third of the industry's revenues. 14 Interestingly, this is the model of appropriation that more than a decade ago, Esther Dyson and John Perry Barlow heralded as the future of music and musicians. They argued in the early 1990s for more or less free access to copies of recordings distributed online, which would lead to greater attendance at live gigs. Revenue from performances, rather than recording, would pay artists. 95 The most common models of industrial R&D outside of pharmaceuticals, however, depend on supply-side effects of information production.

The Rise of the Network Society
by Manuel Castells
Published 31 Aug 1996

Tens of thousands of such “communities” were created throughout the world in the 1990s, most of them based in the US but increasingly reaching out on a global scale. It is, however, still unclear how much sociability is taking place in such electronic networks, and what are the cultural effects of such a new form of sociability, in spite of the efforts of a growing body of researchers.86 The legendary John Perry Barlow, rock singer, co-founder of the libertarian Electronic Frontier Foundation, Internet prophet, and champion of humanitarian causes, was hopeful that “we are now creating a space in which people of the planet can have [a new] kind of communication relationship: I want to be able to completely interact with the consciousness that’s trying to communicate with me.”87 In a more scholarly approach, William Mitchell has convincingly argued that new forms of sociability, and new forms of urban life, adapted to our new technological environment, are emerging on-line.88 And in one of the first psychoanalytical studies of Internet users (actually of members of a Multi Users Dungeons group – MUDs) Sherry Turkle showed that, yes, users were playing roles and building identities on-line.

The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution
by Francis Fukuyama
Published 11 Apr 2011

During the dot-com boom of the 1990s, many enthusiasts argued along the lines of the former Citibank CEO Walter Wriston that the world was experiencing a “twilight of sovereignty,”20 in which the political powers traditionally exercised by states were being undermined by new information technologies that were making borders impossible to police and rules difficult to enforce. The rise of the Internet led activists like John Perry Barlow of the Electronic Frontier Foundation to issue a “Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace,” where governments of the industrialized world were told, “You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.”21 A global capitalist economy would replace the sovereignty of democratic governments with the sovereignty of the market: if a legislature voted for excessive regulation or restricted trade, it would be punished by the bond market and forced to adopt policies deemed rational by global capital markets.22 Fantasies of a stateless world have always found a sympathetic audience in the United States, where hostility to the state is a staple of American political culture.

The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty
by Benjamin H. Bratton
Published 19 Feb 2016

A sectional tracking shot, as in Hitchcock's Rear Window, directed by Alfred Hitchcock (Paramount, 1954). Made in USA, directed by Jean-Luc Godard (Anouchka Films, Rome Paris Films, S.E.P.I.C, 1966). (Or, for that matter, Shigeru Miyamoto's video game Donkey Kong.) 7.  This line of thinking is represented by John Perry Barlow's “Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace” manifesto from 1996, as well as various anarchist and libertarian platforms. To states he warned, “You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.” To his credit, Barlow's opinions have evolved considerably since this text was first posted. 8.