John Perry Barlow

Crack-Up Capitalism: Market Radicals and the Dream of a World Without Democracy

by Quinn Slobodian  · 4 Apr 2023  · 360pp  · 107,124 words

space of computer code rather than the stubborn muck of the outdoors.16 The “Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace,” written by former Grateful Dead songwriter John Perry Barlow and released at the World Economic Forum in Davos in 1996, praised cyberspace as the “new home of the Mind.” Casting the web as a

From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism

by Fred Turner  · 31 Aug 2006  · 339pp  · 57,031 words

, 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

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, 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

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emblems of network members’ own, shared ways of living, and evidence of their individual credibility. Again and again, Brand, and later Kevin Kelly, Howard Rheingold, John Perry Barlow, and others, gave voice to the techno-social visions that emerged in these discussions. As they did, they were welcomed into the halls of Congress

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of computing that threatened to dehumanize the students of the Free Speech Movement promised to liberate the users of the Internet. On February 8, 1996, John Perry Barlow, an information technology journalist and pundit, and a former lyricist for the house band of the San Francisco LSD scene, the Grateful Dead, found himself

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the lives of WELL members. Ultimately, thanks to the work of the many journalists on the system, and particularly the writings of Howard Rheingold and John Perry Barlow, virtual community and electronic frontier became key frames through which Americans would seek to understand the nature of the emerging public Internet. What Was the

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the WELL. Online contributions in social and special-interest conferences led to work for Howard Rheingold, for his equally well-known colleague on the WELL, John Perry Barlow, and in later years for many others. Nonjournalists benefited in the same way. A computer programmer who built a functional bit of software for the

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that had gathered around the system and other Whole Earth–related organizations, became resources for the redefinition of cyberspace itself. In that year computer pundit John Perry Barlow became what most acknowledge to be the first person to apply the word cyberspace to the then-emerging intersection of telecommunications and computer networks.57

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group included Kevin Kelly and Stewart Brand, but its earliest and most active members were the writers and editors of the magazine Mondo 2000, including John Perry Barlow.61 In the fall of 1988, Alison [ 164 ] Chapter 5 Kennedy (aka Queen Mu) and Ken Goffman (aka R. U. Sirius), publisher and editor-in

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learned that this new space was being built right here, right now, and they learned it from at least one writer with solid counterculture credentials: John Perry Barlow. In the summer of 1990 he visited the offices of Jaron Lanier’s VPL Research and donned a pair of VPL Eyephones and a VPL

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have been described as hackers but who had been longtime, high-visibility participants on the WELL. These included Stewart Brand, Howard Rheingold, Kevin Kelly, and John Perry Barlow. Tough later recalled that he chose these participants in part for the fact that they had participated in debates about hacking on the WELL and

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ethic in cybernetic and countercultural terms familiar to their online colleagues. Lee Felsenstein compared hackers to the “Angelheaded hipsters” of Allen Ginsberg’s poem “Howl.” John Perry Barlow described them as solitary inventors designing a system through which humans would acquire the simultaneous unity of other “collective organisms.” Acid Phreak would have none

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Phreak, hackers were break-in artists devoted to exploring and exploiting weaknesses in closed and especially corporate systems. The conflict came to a head over John Perry Barlow’s credit records. For some time, Barlow’s contributions to the online conversation had been echoing the WELL’s longstanding internal ethos of virtual community

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made visible to its readers. Not long after the conclusion of the online discussion, and before the story appeared in the magazine, Harper’s invited John Perry Barlow to dinner with Phreak and Optik in Manhattan. “They looked to be as dangerous as ducks,” he later wrote. By his own account, Barlow became

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the WELL. When he was raided, WELL regulars tended to feel that his “crimes,” even if they had occurred, had not caused any significant damage. John Perry Barlow had long been active in WELL discussions of hacking and free speech, and in 1990 he linked the two as central components of “cyberspace.” In

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immersion in virtual reality, “Sticking Your Head in Cyberspace.” And in the fall of 1990, he published the WELL document “Crime and Puzzlement,” in which John Perry Barlow first used the word cyberspace to describe a digital frontier.39 In all of these cases, Kelly relied on an editorial model that mingled the

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they part of the magazine.20 And many were. Almost immediately, some of the WELL’s most prominent members, including Stewart Brand, Howard Rheingold, and John Perry Barlow, began writing for Wired. To Rossetto and Metcalfe this made sense, since they saw WELL users as living the sort of forward-thinking, technocentric lives

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Frontier Foundation, the Global Business Network, and the Media Lab. The stories often focused on individuals who were also regular contributors to Wired, such as John Perry Barlow in the case of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Peter Schwartz in the case of the Global Business Network. In addition to legitimating Wired’s

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dotted arrow directed the reader to turn the page. There, filling the next two pages, stood the eight principals of the EFF, including Mitch Kapor, John Perry Barlow, Stewart Brand, and Esther Dyson. Across the image ran a single line of text, drawn from the article: “The EFF does something that Mitch Kapor

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Age.”32 A year later, while Gingrich’s portrait graced the cover of Wired, Dyson and Gilder returned to the Aspen conference, taking with them John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, and Stewart Brand, as well as bionomist Michael Rothschild and representatives from Microsoft, America Online, and Sun Microsystems. In keeping with the Whole

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conferences on bionomics that Michael Rothschild had started in 1991. These conferences attracted executives from Silicon Valley as well as libertarians of various stripes (including John Perry Barlow, who spoke at one in 1992).34 As an intellectual framework, bionomics offered a natural meeting point for representatives of the New Right, such as

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the nineteenth century and headed out into the Southwest to build their encampments. Today, the “Magna Carta” suggested, echoing the postcountercultural rhetoric of Wired magazine, John Perry Barlow, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, they need only boot up their computers and head out into cyberspace. This frantic mingling of biological, digital, and frontier

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Aspen, Colorado, and was again sponsored by the PFF. This time, the PFF extended invitations not only to Dyson, Toffler, and Keyworth, but also to John Perry Barlow, Stewart Brand, Kevin Kelly, and executives from Microsoft, America Online, and Sun Microsystems. Corporate sponsors of the event paid $25,000 to attend (other visitors

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New Communalist dream of a nonhierarchical, interpersonally intimate society was on the threshold of coming true. Despite their libertarian orientation, the writings of Esther Dyson, John Perry Barlow, and Kevin Kelly in this period fairly ache with a longing to return to an egalitarian world. For these writers and, due to their influence

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a world would in fact represent a return to a more natural, more intimate state of being, writers such as Kevin Kelly, Esther Dyson, and John Perry Barlow deprived their many readers of a language with which to think about the complex ways in which embodiment shapes all of human life, about the

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overall membership. See Smith, “Voices from the WELL,” 29. 36. Coate, “Cyberspace Innkeeping”; Basch, interview, August 8, 2004. 37. Howard Rheingold, interview, July 20, 2001; John Perry Barlow, interview, August 25, 2003; John Coate, interview, August 25, 2003. 38. Stark, “Ambiguous Assets for Uncertain Environments,” 71. For an early and important application of

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to the WELL June 8, 1990. 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

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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. Creskill, NJ: Hampton Press, 2001. Basch, Reva

The Hacker Crackdown

by Bruce Sterling  · 15 Mar 1992  · 345pp  · 105,722 words

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

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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

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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

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important news items, and hot topical debates, could catch the attention of the entire Well community. Like any community, the Well had its celebrities, and John Perry Barlow, the silver-tongued and silver-modemed lyricist of the Grateful Dead, ranked prominently among them. It was here on the Well that Barlow posted his

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refer to E911 Glossary of Terms. End of Phrack File _____________________________________ The reader is forgiven if he or she was entirely unable to read this document. John Perry Barlow had a great deal of fun at its expense, in "Crime and Puzzlement:" "Bureaucrat-ese of surpassing opacity.... To read the whole thing straight through

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did a great deal to influence serious-minded computer professionals—the sort of people who merely rolled their eyes at the cyberspace rhapsodies of a John Perry Barlow. For young hackers of the digital underground, meeting Dorothy Denning was a genuinely mind-boggling experience. Here was this neatly coiffed, conservatively dressed, dainty little

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the whiff of hacker brimstone about Mitch Kapor. He may not have the hard-riding, hell-for-leather, guitar-strumming charisma of his Wyoming colleague John Perry Barlow, but there's something about the guy that still stops one short. He has the air of the Eastern city dude in the bowler hat

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. Tragedies end in death; comedies in marriage. The Hacker Crackdown is ending in marriage. And there will be a child. From the beginning, anomalies reign. John Perry Barlow, cyberspace ranger, is here. His color photo in The New York Times Magazine, Barlow scowling in a grim Wyoming snowscape, with long black coat, dark

Rise of the Machines: A Cybernetic History

by Thomas Rid  · 27 Jun 2016  · 509pp  · 132,327 words

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

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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

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emerging debate, including the colorful author Howard Rheingold and science fiction legend Bruce Sterling, best known for Mirrorshades, an anthology that defined the cyberpunk genre. John Perry Barlow was one of the first to respond. He mailed in an abstract titled “Music in Cyberspace.” The cattle rancher and Grateful Dead lyricist pointed out

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Deception who did not reveal their names at the time: Mark Abene (a.k.a. Phiber Optik) and Eli Ladopoulos, who hacked as Acid Phreak. John Perry Barlow, one of the more prolific WELL members, was included as well. At one point in the discussion about hacking, Barlow became agitated. The hackers implied

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the rise, and the first remailers were coming online. On December 1, 1992, two days after Gilmore had scored his symbolic victory against the NSA, John Perry Barlow addressed a meeting of national-security and intelligence officials in McLean, Virginia: “I believe you folks in the Intelligence Community are going to [be] challenged

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pins, “Fight the Clipper,” with the old tagline from May’s “Crypto Anarchist Manifesto”: “Arise, you have nothing to lose but your barbed wire fences!” John Perry Barlow had one of the most powerful lines: “You can have my encryption algorithm,” he thundered, yet again using that favorite line, “when you pry my

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destined to trump the territorial state.”81 To back up their futurology, the two pundits called on the acid-dropping former cattle rancher from Wyoming, John Perry Barlow. He had it right, they said: “Anti-sovereign and unregulatable, the Internet calls into question the very idea of a nation-state.”82 Echoing May

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, but too often it tended toward a theology of machines: for Alice Mary Hilton, for Manfred Clynes, for young Jaron Lanier, for Timothy Leary, for John Perry Barlow, for Tim May, or for John Hamre. Often it was—and still is—faith, not facts, that dominated the discussion. Cyberculture turned cybercult. A second

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the rise of computer networks, as this typical illustration shows. The group attending Michael Benedikt’s Cyberconf, May 1990. Of note in this photo are John Perry Barlow (tall in the first row); to Barlow’s left, Sandy Stone; to Barlow’s right, Howard Rheingold, and then gaming theorist Brenda Laurel, followed by

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of bodily interaction through machine interfaces. Mondo 2000’s guide to cyberpunk, laced with irony. Former Wyoming cattle rancher, Grateful Dead lyricist, and gifted writer John Perry Barlow was one of the most charismatic figures “in cyberspace” in the early 1990s. He covered and shaped the early tech counterculture and cofounded the Electronic

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, 2013, http://youtu.be/yYiX42rqbbs?t=5m30s. 81.Ibid. 82.David Sheff, “The Virtual Realities of Timothy Leary,” Upside, April 1990, 70. 83.Ibid. 84.John Perry Barlow, “Being in Nothingness,” Mondo 2000 2 (Summer 1990): 38. 85.Quoted in ibid., 39. 86.Ibid., 36. 87.Ibid. 88.Ibid., 41. 89.Ibid. 90

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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

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.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

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,” Cryptologic Quarterly 12, no. 3–4 (Fall/Winter 1993): 47, DOCID 3929132. 133.“The Rather Petite Internet of 1995,” Royal Pingdom, March 31, 2011. 134.John Perry Barlow, “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace,” February 8, 1996, https://projects.eff.org/~barlow/Declaration-Final.html. 135.Ibid. 7. ANARCHY 1.James Ellis

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Markoff, “In Retreat, U.S. Spy Agency Shrugs at Found Secret Data,” New York Times, November 28, 1992. 50.Gilmore, interview, April 7, 2014. 51.John Perry Barlow, “Remarks,” in First International Symposium: “National Security & National Competitiveness: Open Source Solutions”: Proceedings, vol. 2 (Reston, VA: Open Source Solutions, 1992), 182–83. 52.Timothy

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Ken Goffman. Cybersex illustration, Mondo 2000. Courtesy Ken Goffman. R.U. a Cyberpunk? Mondo 2000, 1993, Nr 10, p. 30. Courtesy Ken Goffman. Photo of John Perry Barlow. Mondo 2000. Courtesy Ken Goffman. John Gilmore. Photo: Kevin Kelly. Timothy C. May. Photo: Kevin Kelly. May, Gilmore, and Hughes. Photo: Larry Dyer, WIRED Magazine

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), 53–54 Bassett, Preston, 37, 38 batch processing, 144 Bates, Roy, 287–88 Bateson, Gregory, 52 and Ashby’s homeostat, 56, 58, 60, 61, 70 John Perry Barlow and, 227 and cybernetic myths, 345 and evolution of cybernetics, 70 Steps to an Ecology of Mind, 174–80 and the WELL, 194 bats (noise

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, 306–7; See also cyberwar cyberpunk, 209–12, 246, 297, 298 cybersecurity, global market for, x cybersex, 235–37 cyberspace Austin conference (1990), 231–35 John Perry Barlow and, 224–27 Communications Decency Act, 244–45 cybernetic myths, 345–47 Cyberthon, 240–43 cyberwar, 304–5 “Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace,” 244

Barefoot Into Cyberspace: Adventures in Search of Techno-Utopia

by Becky Hogge, Damien Morris and Christopher Scally  · 26 Jul 2011  · 171pp  · 54,334 words

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

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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

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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

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apart in part due to their own inertia.” * * * For the cyberpunks Cory followed in the eighties, the internet wasn’t just a communications tool. As John Perry Barlow recognised when he formed the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the ’net was a place, a free place, and that freedom needed to be defended. Many of

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Overload It’s now over a quarter of a century since Stewart Brand suggested that “information wants to be free”, and around 15 years since John Perry Barlow released his Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace. Are those of us who still take inspiration from these events simply living in the past? How

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advertising executives, seemed like a good step on the way to that dream. I can’t be sure, but I think that’s also what John Perry Barlow meant by freedom when he talked about his “civilization of the Mind in Cyberspace… more humane and fair than the world your governments have made

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political calculus — has emerged to shape a new geopolitical information landscape. The 2010 report describes how cyberspace, once thought to be outside the jurisdiction of John Perry Barlow’s “weary giants of flesh and steel”, is in fact being “colonized” by governments, and in particular by those governments like the US and China

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read it as prophecy and not as prediction, if you read into him as a prophet, in that sense of a prophet,” Ethan goes on, “John Perry Barlow isn’t completely crazy. He’s saying, ‘here is what we could have, now let’s do the work to get there.’ And he’s

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its users. Online, the vanguard has long ago been joined by the rest of the world, and the rest of the world didn’t get John Perry Barlow’s memo. It costs about $6,000 to attend a major TED conference like TED Global as a delegate. Although the contract he signed as

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, say, Iran, while avoiding any action that would, as Sami wrote, “endanger the ‘stability’ of the dictatorial Arab order”. It’s depressing to think that John Perry Barlow’s “civilisation of mind” could revert so easily to nationalist lines at the first sign of trouble. When I spoke to him, Ethan was clearly

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phone calls from the powers-that-be, it was also about to turn out to be impossible. On 3 December, techno-Utopian and WELL original John Perry Barlow posted the following on Twitter: The first serious infowar is now engaged. The field of battle is WikiLeaks. You are the troops. It was 14

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/wp/2010/09/14/haystack-vs-how-the-internet-works/. Perry Barlow, John. 1990. “Crime and Puzzlement”, June 8. http://w2.eff.org/Misc/Publications/John_Perry_Barlow/HTML/crime_and_puzzlement_1.html. ———. 1996. A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace. February 8. https://projects.eff.org/~barlow/Declaration-Final.html. PlentyMag

The Transparent Society: Will Technology Force Us to Choose Between Privacy and Freedom?

by David Brin  · 1 Jan 1998  · 205pp  · 18,208 words

,” 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

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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

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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

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lose track of which predictions are tangible and which seem more like “vapor.” Some very smart people can get swept up by hyperbole, as when John Perry Barlow, a cofounder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, declared the Internet “the most important human advancement since the printing press.” Barlow later recanted, calling it simply

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legitimate concern. But the world within belongs to each of us. Fealty to the latter attitude is widespread among “netizens,” and was recently expressed by John Perry Barlow. Action is what the body does, over which physical authority may be exercised. In cyberspace, I might threaten to kill you, [but] in New York

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ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather. This quotation from John Perry Barlowʼs “A Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace” illustrates one of the essential issues that will confront us in the coming decades: a realignment of the

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York: HarperCollins, 1997). 23 ... Kevin Kelly ... expressed the same idea ... Josh Quittner. “Invasion of Privacy,” Time, 25 August 1997. 23 ... I have no secrets myself ... John Perry Barlow is quoted in Netview: The Global Business Network Journal, summer/fall 1995. The rest of Barlowʼs paragraph follows: “I am concerned with what happens

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the same as actions, few human males will be found in Heaven. 126 ... an effort to extend government authority beyond the physical into the mental ... John Perry Barlow here refers to his “Declaration of Cyberspace Independence,” Wired, June 1996 (cited earlier). 128 ... cite a popular book or film ... whose professed message is conformity

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is a rather high dose. 217 ... Which “eccentric” is more likely to be let alone? ... Again, we turn for a colorful illustration to the irrepressible John Perry Barlow ( Netview, September 1995): “I come from a town in Wyoming where everybody knows everything about everybody all the time. But there you have a kind

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(and critical) eye to early drafts of this book. These good folks include Stefan Jones, John Gilmore, Steve Jackson, Carl Malamud, Roger Clarke, Oliver Morton, John Perry Barlow, Bruce Murray, Bruce Sterling, Chris Peterson, Robin Hanson, Xavier Fan, Martha Minow, Ann Florini, Peter Swire, Michael Foale, Gregory Benford, Joe Miller, Robert Qualkinbush, Gary

Dawn of the New Everything: Encounters With Reality and Virtual Reality

by Jaron Lanier  · 21 Nov 2017  · 480pp  · 123,979 words

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

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’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

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’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

Cult of the Dead Cow: How the Original Hacking Supergroup Might Just Save the World

by Joseph Menn  · 3 Jun 2019  · 302pp  · 85,877 words

-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

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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

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’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

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introduced Deibert to Laird. The two men had long talks about the technological, social, political, and business challenges of keeping the internet as free as John Perry Barlow had declared it to be. They spoke about the need to get and publish objective, detailed information about what was happening inside routers and switches

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it with his documents in 2013, though Assange did later dispatch a colleague to spirit him from Hong Kong to Moscow and asylum. Inspired by John Perry Barlow’s independence declaration, Snowden wore an Electronic Frontier Foundation sweatshirt on the job at the NSA. When he felt compelled to warn the world about

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major technology innovations, see John Markoff’s What the Dormouse Said (New York: Viking, 2005). “I’ve been in redneck bars wearing shoulder-length curls”: John Perry Barlow, “Crime and Puzzlement,” Electronic Frontier Foundation, June 1990, www.eff.org/pages/crime-and-puzzlement. The site has a collection of his other writings as

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#article. “participant Jordan Ritter”: In addition to Ritter and Fanning, others in my Napster book All the Rave who show up in this volume are John Perry Barlow, Yobie Benjamin, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Jan Koum, Kevin Mitnick, and Dug Song. Napster cofounder Sean Parker went on to serve as Facebook’s first

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life. “Laird memorialized the event in classic cDc style”: This was in an email circulated to the group. “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace”: John Perry Barlow, “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace,” Electronic Frontier Foundation, February 8, 1996, www.eff.org/cyberspace-independence. “Barlow said that the innocence”: I interviewed

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. “WikiLeaks’s flagging reputation”: How Snowden chose his journalists was laid out long after he went public. This version was presented at a memorial for John Perry Barlow, which I attended. A video of the memorial is available online and worth watching: https://supporters.eff.org/civicrm/event/info?reset=1&id=191

The Great Firewall of China

by James Griffiths;  · 15 Jan 2018  · 453pp  · 114,250 words

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

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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

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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

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  · 15 Oct 2018  · 568pp  · 164,014 words

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

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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

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: Michael Fusco on Violent Crime in New York,” Saturday Night Live, NBC, www.nbc.com/saturday-night-live/video/leftover-night/n10009?snl=1. 8. John Perry Barlow, “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace,” Electronic Frontier Foundation, n.d., www.eff.org/cyberspace-independence. 9. Steven Levy, Hackers: Heroes of the Computer

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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

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