Thursday, January 23, 2025

A00089 - John Perry Barlow, American Poet, Essayist, Cattle Rancher, and Cyberlibertarian Who Coined the Word "Cyberspace"


Barlow, John Perry - A00089

"I'd complain about being bored and she'd say, "Anyone who's bored isn't paying close enough attention."  (Barlow quoting his mother) (09/21/2022)

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John Perry Barlow
Barlow in August 2012
Barlow in August 2012
BornOctober 3, 1947
near Cora, Wyoming, U.S.
DiedFebruary 7, 2018 (aged 70)
San Francisco, California, U.S.
Occupation
Alma materWesleyan University
Period1971–95 (lyrics)
1990–2018 (essays)
SubjectInternet (essays)

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John Perry Barlow (born October 3, 1947, near Pinedale, Wyoming, U.S.—died February 7, 2018, San Francisco, California) was an American author, lyricist, and cyberspace activist who cofounded (1990) the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), which sought to protect the rights and freedoms of individuals in the digital world.


Barlow spent his childhood on his family’s cattle ranch in Wyoming, and he later attended Fountain Valley School of Colorado, where he became friends with Bob Weir, future guitarist for the Grateful Dead. He then studied at Wesleyan University, graduating with a degree in comparative religion in 1969. In 1971 Barlow began writing lyrics for the Grateful Dead, and with Weir he later penned such songs as “Cassidy” and “Mexicali Blues.” That year Barlow returned to Wyoming, and after his father died in 1972, he ran the family cattle ranch until 1988, when it was sold.


In the late 1980s Barlow began using the Internet, and he became a frequent poster at The WELL, an online community. It discussed a variety of topics—Grateful Dead fans were frequent users, which was what originally drew Barlow to the community—and in 1990 he began posting about the U.S. Secret Service’s series of raids that were intended to combat computer hacking. Believing that people’s constitutional rights were being violated, Barlow—together with Mitch Kapor and John Gilmore—founded the EFF. Its first major case involved Steve Jackson Games, which the Secret Service alleged was the recipient of an illegally copied computer file relating to BellSouth’s 911 emergency system. Agents seized several of the firm’s computers, and although they were eventually returned, some data had been deleted. The EFF provided legal aid, and in 1993 the court ruled that Jackson’s rights had been violated. The EFF was later involved with a number of cases, dealing with such issues as music copyright, trademark law, and anonymity relating to cyberspace.

Among Barlow’s extensive writings about the Internet is a 1990 essay in which he used the word cyberspace—taken from William Gibson’s science-fiction novels—to describe the Internet; that essay is credited with being the first such use of the word. He was an early contributor to Wired magazine, in which he published “The Economy of Ideas” (1994), a hugely influential article in which he argued that the nature of digital information and the Internet made traditional intellectual property and copyright laws obsolete. Following the passage of the controversial Communications Decency Act (1996), which attempted to place prohibitions on Internet speech in various ways, Barlow wrote the widely disseminated “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace,” in which he argued that cyberspace should be freed from outdated notions of property, expression, and identity. (Portions of the act were later struck down in various legal challenges.)

In 1997 Barlow was a fellow at the Institute of Politics at Harvard. The following year he became a fellow at the university’s law school.

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John Perry Barlow (October 3, 1947 – February 7, 2018) was an American poet, essayist, cattle rancher, and cyberlibertarian[1] political activist who had been associated with both the Democratic and Republican parties. He was also a lyricist for the Grateful Dead, a founding member of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Freedom of the Press Foundation, and an early fellow at Harvard University's Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society.[2]

Early life and education

[edit]

Barlow was born in Sublette County, Wyoming near the town of Cora,[3] the only child of Norman Walker Barlow (1905–1972),[4][5] a Republican state legislator, and his wife, Miriam Adeline Barlow (née Jenkins, later Bailey; 1905–1999),[6] who married in 1929.[7]

Barlow's paternal ancestors were Mormon pioneers.[7] He grew up on Bar Cross Ranch in Cora, Wyoming, a 22,000-acre (8,900 ha) property his great-uncle founded in 1907, and attended elementary school in a one-room schoolhouse. Raised as a devout Mormon, he was prohibited from watching television until the sixth grade, when his parents allowed him to "absorb televangelists".[8][9]

Although Barlow's academic record was erratic throughout his secondary education, he "had his pick of top eastern universities... simply because he was from Wyoming, where few applications originated".[10] In 1969, he graduated from Wesleyan University's College of Letters.[11] He served as Wesleyan's student body president until the administration "tossed him into a sanitarium" following a drug-induced attempted suicide attack in Boston, Massachusetts.[8][10] After two weeks of rehabilitation, he returned to his studies.[10] In his senior year, he became a part-time resident of New York City's East Village and immersed himself in Andy Warhol's Factory demimonde, cultivating a friendship with Rene Ricard and developing a brief addiction to heroin.[12]

As he neared graduation, Barlow was admitted to Harvard Law School and was contracted to write a novel by Farrar, Straus and Giroux at the behest of his mentor, the autodidactic Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist and historian Paul Horgan.[13] Initially supported by a $5,000 or $1,000[13] advance from the publisher,[10] he decided to eschew these options in favor of spending the next two years traveling around the world, including a nine-month sojourn in India, a riotous winter in a summer cottage on Long Island Sound in Connecticut,[13] and a screenwriting foray in Los Angeles. Barlow eventually finished the novel, but it was rejected by several publishers (including Farrar, Straus and Giroux) and remains unpublished.[9][14] During this period, he also "lived beside Needle Park on New York's Upper West Side and dealt cocaine in Spanish Harlem".[10]

Career

[edit]

Grateful Dead

[edit]

At age 15, Barlow became a student at the Fountain Valley School in Colorado Springs, Colorado. There he met Bob Weir, who later co-founded the Grateful Dead. Weir and Barlow maintained a close friendship through the years.

As a frequent visitor during college to Timothy Leary's facility in Millbrook, New York, Barlow was introduced to LSD; he later claimed to have consumed the substance over 1,000 times.[10] These transformative experiences led him to distance himself from Mormonism. He went on to facilitate the first meeting between the Grateful Dead and the Leary organization (who recognized each other as kindred souls in spite of their differing philosophical approaches) in June 1967.[15]

While on his way to California to reunite with the Grateful Dead in 1971, Barlow stopped at his family's ranch, not intending to stay. His father had suffered a debilitating stroke in 1966 before dying in 1972, resulting in a $700,000 business debt. Dismayed by the situation, Barlow changed his plans and began practicing animal husbandry under the auspices of the Bar Cross Land and Livestock Company in Cora, Wyoming, for almost two decades. To support the ranch, he continued to write and sell spec scripts.[10] In the meantime, Barlow was still able to play an active role in the Grateful Dead while recruiting many unconventional part-time ranch hands from the mainstream as well as the counterculture.[16] Prior to his death in 2018, John Byrne Cooke intended to produce a documentary film (provisionally titled The Bar Cross Ranch) that documented this era.[17]

Barlow orating at the European Graduate School of Leuk, Switzerland in 2006

Barlow became interested in collaborating with Weir at a Grateful Dead show at the Capitol Theatre in Port Chester, New York, in February 1971. Until then, Weir had mostly worked with resident Dead lyricist Robert Hunter. Hunter preferred that those who sang his songs stick to his "canonical" lyrics rather than improvise additions or rearrange words. A feud erupted backstage over a couplet in "Sugar Magnolia" from the band's most recent release (most likely "She can dance a Cajun rhythm/Jump like a Willys in four-wheel drive"), culminating in a disgruntled Hunter summoning Barlow and telling him "take [Weir]—he's yours".[18]

In late 1971, with a deal for a solo album in hand and only two songs completed, Weir and Barlow began to write together for the first time. They co-wrote songs such as "Cassidy", "Mexicali Blues" and "Black-Throated Wind", all three of which remained in the repertoires of the Grateful Dead and of Weir's varied solo projects.[19] Barlow subsequently collaborated with Grateful Dead keyboardist Brent Mydland, a partnership that culminated in four songs on 1989's Built to Last. He also wrote one song ("The Devil I Know") with Mydland's successor, Vince Welnick.[20]

Internet activism

[edit]
Barlow with Nicholas Negroponte

In 1986, Barlow joined The WELL, an online community then known for a strong Deadhead presence. He served on the company's board of directors for several years.[21] In 1990, Barlow founded the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) with fellow digital-rights activists John Gilmore and Mitch Kapor.[22]

As a founder of EFF, Barlow helped publicize the Secret Service raid on Steve Jackson Games. His involvement is documented in The Hacker Crackdown: Law and Disorder on the Electronic Frontier (1992) by Bruce Sterling.[23] EFF later sponsored the groundbreaking case Steve Jackson Games, Inc. v. United States Secret Service in support of Steve Jackson Games. Steve Jackson Games won the case in 1993.[24]

In 1996, Barlow was invited to speak about his work in cyberspace to a middle school classroom at North Shore Country Day School. This event was highly influential upon the life of then-student Aaron Swartz: Swartz's father Robert recalls Aaron coming home that day a changed person.[25][26] That year, Barlow also wrote[27] "A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace", a widely disseminated creed for the Internet.

In 2003, Barlow met the recently appointed Brazilian Minister of Culture Gilberto Gil at the event Tactic Media Brazil to discuss the perspectives of digital inclusion and political participation, which in the following years helped shape Brazilian governmental policy on intellectual property and digital media.[28][29] In 2004, the two began working together to expand the availability and variety of Brazilian music to remix and share online. At the same time, as one of the "digerati", Barlow was among the first users of the invitation-only social network Orkut at its inception. He decided to send all of his 100 invitations to friends in Brazil; two years later, some 11 million internet users in that country (out of 14 million total) were on the social network.[30]

Writing

[edit]

From 1971 to 1995, Barlow wrote lyrics for the Grateful Dead, mostly through his relationship with Weir. Barlow's songs include "Cassidy" (about Neal Cassady and Cassidy Law),[31] "Estimated Prophet", "Black-Throated Wind", "Hell in a Bucket", "Mexicali Blues", "The Music Never Stopped" and "Throwing Stones".

Portrait of Barlow, 2009

Barlow wrote extensively for Wired magazine, as well as The New York Times, Nerve, and Communications of the ACM. In his writings, he explained the wonder of the Internet. The Internet to him was more than a computer network; he called it an "electronic frontier".[1] "He frequently wrote in language that echoed Henry Morton Stanley's African diary. 'Imagine discovering a continent so vast that it may have no end to its dimensions. Imagine a new world with more resources than all our future greed might exhaust, more opportunities than there will ever be entrepreneurs enough to exploit, and a peculiar kind of real estate that expands with development. Imagine a place where trespassers leave no footprints, where goods can be stolen infinite number of times and yet remain in the possession of their original owners, where business you never heard of can own the history of your personal affairs.'"[32]

Barlow's writings include "A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace", written in response to the enactment of the Communications Decency Act in 1996. The EFF saw the law as a threat to the independence and sovereignty of cyberspace. He argued that the cyberspace legal order would reflect the ethical deliberation of the community instead of the coercive power that characterized real-space governance.[33] Since online "identities have no bodies", they found it inappropriate to obtain order in the cyberspace by physical coercion.[34] Instead, ethics, enlightened self-interest and the commonwealth were the elements they believed to create a civilization of the Mind in Cyberspace.[33]

In his 1990 piece "Crime and Puzzlement: in advance of the law on the electronic frontier", Barlow wrote about his firsthand experience with Phiber Optik (Mark Abene) and Acid Phreak (Elias Ladopoulos) from the hacker group Masters of Deception, and mentioned Kevin Mitnick—all of whom were engaged in phone phreaking.[35] The title alludes to Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky.[36]

Barlow is credited with popularizing of the concept of pronoia (defined as the opposite of paranoia) and was considered a celebrity ally of the Zippy Pronoia Tour in 1994.[37]

In 1998, Barlow wrote the article "Africa Rising: Everything You Know About Africa Is Wrong" for Wired, which documented the start of his extensive travels as he worked to expand Internet access across the continent: "I went from Mombasa to Tombouctou, experiencing various parts of Kenya, Ghana, the Ivory Coast, Mali, Uganda, and the Virunga volcano area where Uganda, Rwanda, and the Congo meet. Part of the idea was that I would attempt to email Wired a series of dispatches on my travels. The act of finding a port into cyberspace would be part of the adventure… Before I left, I believed Africans could proceed directly from the agricultural epoch into an information economy without having to submit to the dreary indignities and social pathologies of industrialization".[38]

Barlow also returned to writing lyrics, most recently with The String Cheese Incident's mandolinist and vocalist Michael Kang, including their song "Desert Dawn". He was seen many times with Carolyn Garcia (whose monologue is dubbed on the eponymous track "Mountain Girl"[39]) at their concerts mixing with the fans and members in the band, and was a close friend of String Cheese Incident producer Jerry Harrison. He also participated with the Chicago-based jam band Mr. Blotto on their release Barlow Shanghai. Barlow was a spiritual mentor and student of Kemp Muhl and Sean Lennon,[40] collaborating with their band The Ghost of a Saber Tooth Tiger and making a cameo in their 2014 music video "Animals".[41]

One of Barlow's works that has remained in circulation is his "Principles of Adult Behavior", which he wrote in 1977 on the eve of his 30th birthday and continued to use to describe his approach to life.[42][43] He described his reason for writing these as he was about to enter adulthood, "my wariness of the pursuit of happiness might be a subtle form of treason".[44] While he considered most of the 25 statements similar to the platitudes Polonius dispensed to Prince Hamlet, the 15th attracted attention: "Avoid the pursuit of happiness. Seek to define your mission and pursue that". That was counter to prevailing thought and "un-American". Barlow saw this more as a way to challenge how one perceived their life, their job, and their goals in life, and to not see achieving happiness as "an obligation [one owes] to Jefferson, the United States, or God Itself".[44]

Politics

[edit]

Barlow was chairman of the Sublette County Republican Party,[when?] and served as western Wyoming campaign coordinator of Dick Cheney’s 1978 Congressional campaign.

Barlow was president of the Wyoming Outdoor Council from 1978 to 1984.

He was[when?] chairman of the Sublette County Master Plan Design Commission and served on the Sublette County Planning and Zoning Commission for many years; in that capacity, he was one of five ranchers who administered water distribution in the New Fork Irrigation District (an area of nearly 100,000 acres serving about 35 ranchers).[45]

Despite having once lauded Cheney as "the smartest man I've ever met [with] the possible exception of Bill Gates", Barlow renounced Cheney before his vice presidency, owing to his perceived repudiation of environmental and civil-rights issues in Congress. Barlow opined that "Dick's votes… were parts of complex deals aimed at enhancing his own power… [H]e has the least interest in human beings of anyone I have ever met".[46][47]

Barlow was named "One of the 25 Most Influential People in Financial Services" in the June 1999 issue of FutureBanker Magazine.[48] By the early 2000s, Barlow was unable to reconcile his ardent libertarianism with the prevailing neoconservative movement, and "didn't feel tempted to vote for Bush". In 2004, he said that he was "voting for John Kerry, though with little enthusiasm".[49]

Contemporaneously, he characterized cocaine derogatorily as a "Republican drug" that "makes its users self-obsessed, aggressive, and greedy".[50] Barlow subsequently said that he remained a Republican, most notably during an appearance on The Colbert Report on March 26, 2007,[51][52] and also claimed to be an anarchist.[53]

Barlow said he voted for Natural Law Party Presidential candidate John Hagelin in 2000 after discovering in the voting booth that his friend Nat Goldhaber was Hagelin's running mate.[49] He said in 2004: "I'm embarrassed for my country that in my entire voting life, there has never been a major-party candidate whom I felt I could vote for. All of my presidential votes, whether for George Wallace, Dick Gregory, or John Hagelin, have been protest votes".[49] Barlow condemned Donald Trump in November 2016, characterizing him as a "thorough creep" and "toxic asshole" in a Facebook "micromanifesto".[54]

Later work

[edit]

Until his death, Barlow served on the EFF's board of directors, where he was listed as a co-founder after previously serving as vice chairman.[55] The EFF was designed to mediate the "inevitable conflicts that have begun to occur on the border between Cyberspace and the physical world". It tried to build a legal wall separating and protecting the Internet from territorial government, especially the US government.[56]

Barlow dove hunting with a shotgun near Corpus Christi, Texas in 2014

In 2012, Barlow was one of the founders of the EFF-related Freedom of the Press Foundation and also served on its board of directors until his death.[57] He had several public conversations via video conference with fellow Freedom of the Press Foundation Board of Directors member Edward Snowden,[58][59] and appeared in interviews with Julian Assange of WikiLeaks touting Snowden as a hero.[60]

Barlow was a Fellow of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School (1997–2007; Fellow Emeritus thereafter);[2] a member of the advisory board of Diamond Management & Technology Consultants (1994–2008);[61] a member of the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences;[citation needed] and "professor of cyberspace" (2011) at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland.[62]

In his final years, Barlow spent much of his time on the road, lecturing about and consulting on civil rights, freedom of speech, the state of the internet and the EFF. He delivered lectures and panel discussions at TWiT Live,[63] TedxHamburg, Hamburg (Germany),[64] Greenfest SF,[65] Civitas (Norwegian think tank),[66] Internet Society (New York Chapter),[67] the USC Center on Public Diplomacy,[68] and the European Graduate School.[69] On September 16, 2012, he was a presenter at TEDxSantaCruz,[clarification needed] in Santa Cruz, California.[70]

On September 8, 2014, Barlow was the first speaker in the Art, Activism, and Technology: The 50th Anniversary of the Free Speech Movement colloquium series at University of California, Berkeley.[71]

Barlow also served on the advisory boards of the Marijuana Policy Project,[72] Clear Path International, TTI/Vanguard, the Hypothes.is project,[73] the stakeholder engagement nonprofit Future 500 and the global company Touch Light Media[74] founded by Anita Ondine. He was a collaborator on the WetheData project founded by Juliette Powell.[75]

He was Vice President at Algae Systems, a Nevada-based company with a working demo-scale pilot plant in Daphne, Alabama, dedicated to commercializing novel methods at the water-energy nexus for growing microalgae offshore as a second-generation biofuels feedstock and converting it to useful crude via hydrothermal liquefaction, while simultaneously treating wastewater, reducing carbon dioxide in Earth's atmosphere, and producing biochar.[76]

At Startup Grind Jackson Hole on March 13, 2015, Barlow said that he was motivated to team up with Algae Systems after undergoing back surgery to address pain from an old ranching injury, while he had been an advisor to Herb Allison (president of Merrill Lynch at the time) and working to completely "electronify" financial transactions and speculative asset assembly. The surgery successfully alleviated the pain and catalyzed Barlow to change his focus from building wealth to building infrastructure in order to do something about the "amount of alterations we are already enacting on Planet Earth… We are not necessarily making it warmer, but weirder". At Startup Grind Jackson Hole, Barlow also explained how once over tea with "Grandmother of the Conservation Movement" Mardy Murie, he was inspired by her words, "Environmentalists can be a pain in the ass… But they make great ancestors". Adopting this philosophy, he stated, "I want to be a good ancestor".[77]

Barlow serving as wedding minister at Mount Tamalpais on July 11, 2014

For several years, Barlow attended Burning Man. In 2013, he led a town hall meeting with Burning Man co-founder Larry Harvey about "the current state [o]f Practical Anarchy at Burning Man".[78][79]

A stir in the media transpired when retired U.S. Army general Wesley Clark attended Burning Man in 2013 and spent time with Barlow and Harvey.[80]

Barlow appeared in many films and television shows, both as an actor and as himself. Interviews with Barlow have been featured in documentaries such as the Tao Ruspoli-directed film Monogamish (under production),[81] Bits & Bytes (under production),[82] and Dying to Know: Ram Dass & Timothy Leary.[83]

The iPhone app Detour, released in February 2015 by Groupon founder and ex-CEO Andrew Mason, features a 75-minute audio tour narrated by Barlow as he walks through the Tenderloin neighborhood in downtown San Francisco.[84][85][86]

Barlow was also a self-ordained minister who performed baptisms and weddings.[87][88]

Barlow's memoir, Mother American Night: My Life in Crazy Times, was published posthumously in June 2018. Written with Robert Greenfield, it is a full-length recounting of his life and times. The book was completed days before Barlow's death in February of that year.[89]

Personal life

[edit]

Barlow married Elaine Parker Barlow in 1977,[4] and the couple had three daughters: Amelia Rose, Anna Winter, and Leah Justine.[90] Elaine and John separated in 1992 and divorced in 1995. In 2002, he helped his friend, the realtor, entrepreneur,[91] model[92] and actress Simone Banos deliver her daughter Emma Victoria, whom he regarded as his surrogate daughter thereafter.[93][94]

Barlow was engaged to Cynthia Horner, a doctor he met in 1993 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco while she was attending a psychiatry conference and Barlow was participating in a Steve Jobs comedy roast at a convention for the NeXT Computer. She died unexpectedly in 1994 while asleep on a flight from Los Angeles to New York City, days before her 30th birthday, from a heart arrhythmia apparently caused by undetected viral myocarditis. Barlow describes this period in his life in the This American Life episode "Conventions", from August 29, 1997.[95]

Barlow had been a good friend and mentor to John F. Kennedy Jr., ever since his mother Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis had made arrangements for her troublesome son to be a wrangler at the Bar Cross Ranch for six months in 1978. The two men later went on many double dates in New York City with Cynthia and Kennedy's then-girlfriend Daryl Hannah.[96][97]

Barlow in 2005

In a piece for Nerve, "A Ladies Man and Shameless: A Polygamist's Manifesto",[98] Barlow professed his love of many women at the same time, and summarized the relationships in his personal life: "I doubt I'll ever be monogamous again ... I want to know as many more women as time and their indulgence will permit me ... There are probably twenty-five or thirty women—I certainly don't count them—for whom I feel an abiding and deep emotional attachment. They're scattered all over the planet. They range in age from less than half to almost twice my own. Most of these relationships are not actively sexual. Some were at one time. More never will be. But most of them feel as if they could become so. I love the feel of that tension, the delicious gravity of possibilities".[99]

Barlow was a friend and former roommate[100] of the technology entrepreneur Sean Parker.

In 2014, Barlow suffered the loss of Buck, his beloved Maine Coon cat that he believed to be a bodhisattva;[101] the cat had many fans on social media.[102]

After a series of illnesses, Barlow suffered a near-fatal heart attack on May 27, 2015. He later reported that he was recovering.[103] After a prolonged hospitalization, the John Perry Barlow Wellness Fund was established in October 2016 to allay outstanding medical bills and "provide the quality and consistency of care that is critical to Barlow's recovery as he faces a variety of debilitating health conditions", including "extremely compromised mobility".[104] A concert held on October 11, 2016, to benefit the fund at Sweetwater Music Hall in Mill Valley, California, featured Weir, Ramblin' Jack Elliott, Jerry Harrison, Les Claypool, Robin Sylvester, Jeff Chimenti, Steve Kimock, Sean Lennon, Lukas Nelson, and members of The String Cheese Incident.[105]

Death

[edit]

Barlow died in his sleep on the night of February 7, 2018, at his San Francisco home, at the age of 70.[106][107][108]

References

[edit]
  1. ^ Jump up to:a b Goldsmith & Wu 2006, p. 17.
  2. ^ Jump up to:a b 
  3. ^ The Internet: Biographies, p. 8.
  4. ^ Jump up to:a b Jones 2002, p. 23.
  5. ^ "Norman Walker Barlow". Geni.com. October 1905. Archived from the original on February 10, 2018.
  6. ^ "Miriam Adeline Barlow". Geni.com. October 24, 1905. Archived from the original on February 10, 2018.
  7. ^ Jump up to:a b "Obituary: Miriam Jenkins Barlow Bailey". Deseret News. July 12, 1999. Archived from the original on February 9, 2018.
  8. ^ Jump up to:a b Jarnow, Jesse (March 29, 2016). Heads: A Biography of Psychedelic America. Da Capo Press. ISBN 9780306822568. Archived from the original on June 9, 2024. Retrieved October 18, 2020 – via Google Books.
  9. ^ Jump up to:a b "Keeping Up with John Perry Barlow – TipJar". April 14, 2016. Archived from the original on April 17, 2017.
  10. ^ Jump up to:a b c d e f g "John Perry Barlow's Last Words – WhoWhatWhy". whowhatwhy.org. February 13, 2018. Archived from the original on April 30, 2018. Retrieved April 30, 2018.
  11. ^ "Grateful Dead Lyricist, Internet Rights Advocate John Perry Barlow '69 Dies". Archived from the original on December 24, 2022. Retrieved March 16, 2022.
  12. ^ Barlow, John Perry; Greenfield, Robert (May 28, 2019). Mother American Night: My Life in Crazy Times. Crown Archetype. ISBN 9781524760199. Archived from the original on June 9, 2024. Retrieved October 18, 2020 – via Google Books.
  13. ^ Jump up to:a b c McEnteer, James (June 2, 2018). My long strange winter trip with John Perry Barlow, a legend in the making Archived June 5, 2018, at the Wayback Machine. Salon. Accessed December 6, 2022.
  14. ^ "John Perry Barlow". People.com. Archived from the original on March 30, 2016. Retrieved March 29, 2016.
  15. ^ Greenfield, Robert (February 7, 2018). Timothy Leary: A Biography. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. ISBN 978-0151005000. Archived from the original on June 9, 2024. Retrieved October 18, 2020 – via Google Books.
  16. ^ "John Perry Barlow Portfolio". Cookephoto.com. Archived from the original on April 17, 2016. Retrieved March 29, 2016.
  17. ^ John Byrne Cooke. "John Byrne Cooke". LinkedIn. Retrieved March 29, 2016.
  18. ^ McNally, Dennis (2002), A Long Strange Trip: The Inside History of the Grateful Dead, Broadway, p. 394
  19. ^ "Ace – Bob Weir". AllMusic. Archived from the original on July 17, 2017. Retrieved February 8, 2018.
  20. ^ "Built to Last – Grateful Dead". AllMusic. Archived from the original on August 23, 2017. Retrieved February 8, 2018.
  21. ^ "Internet rights advocate John Perry Barlow dies". CNN. February 7, 2018. Archived from the original on February 8, 2018. Retrieved February 8, 2018.
  22. ^ "A History of Protecting Freedom Where Law and Technology Collide". The Electronic Frontier Foundation. October 7, 2011. Archived from the original on January 4, 2018. Retrieved February 7, 2018.
  23. ^ Sterling, Bruce (1992). The Hacker Crackdown, law and disorder on the electronic frontier at Project Gutenberg
  24. ^ Plunkett, Luke (May 13, 2011). "The Day the Secret Service Raided a Role-Playing Game Company". Kotaku. Archived from the original on October 28, 2016. Retrieved February 7, 2018.
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Bibliography

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John Perry Barlow, 70, Dies; Championed an Unfettered Internet

John Perry Barlow during a forum on the internet’s impact on society, held at New York University in 2014.Credit...Richard Drew/Associated Press

By Sam Roberts

John Perry Barlow, a former cowpoke, Republican politician and lyricist for the Grateful Dead whose affinity for wide open spaces and free expression transformed him into a leading defender of an unfettered internet, died on Wednesday at his home in San Francisco. He was 70.

His death was confirmed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which he helped found in San Francisco in 1990. No cause was given, but the organization said he had been ailing after a heart attack in 2015.

At his death, Mr. Barlow was a vice chairman of the foundation, which has been in the vanguard of legal challenges to government constraints on cyberspace — a term he helped popularize in 1990 to describe boundless digital telecommunications networks.

“There are a lot of similarities between cyberspace and open space,” Mr. Barlow, who was raised on his family’s 22,000-acre cattle ranch in Wyoming, told People magazine in 1995. “There is a lot of room to define yourself. You can literally make yourself up.”

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His plea for an open internet was inspired, in part, by the Grateful Dead’s uncommon practice of welcoming audiences to record the band’s concerts.

Lawyers recruited or supported by the Electronic Frontier Foundation were instrumental in winning court rulings that granted electronic mail the same privacy protection as telephone calls, and that defined written software code as free speech guaranteed by the First Amendment.

The foundation was formed by Mr. Barlow; Mitchell Kapor, the former president of Lotus Development Corporation; and John Gilmore, one of the first employees of Sun Microsystems.

In 1995, Mr. Kapor called Mr. Barlow “the uncrowned poet laureate of cyberspace.”

Cindy Cohn, the foundation’s executive director, said in a statement that Mr. Barlow “was sometimes held up as a straw man for a kind of naïve techno-utopianism that believed that the internet could solve all of humanity’s problems without causing any more.”

But his “lasting legacy,” she said, “is that he devoted his life to making the internet into ‘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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More than a defender of the internet, Mr. Barlow had many guises in an uneven evolution from an only child whose nearest neighbor lived four miles away to a corporate consultant and citizen of the world.

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Mr. Barlow spoke at a 2012 rally in Manhattan against proposed internet anti-piracy legislation that opponents said would infringe on online freedom of speech. The legislation never passed.Credit...Michael Appleton for The New York Times

From around 1971 until the Grateful Dead disbanded after the founding member Jerry Garcia’s death in 1995 (though the group periodically reunited in different configurations and under different names for many years after, and performed what were billed as its last concerts in 2015), he wrote lyrics for such well-known songs as “Estimated Prophet,” “Cassidy,” “The Music Never Stopped,” “Mexicali Blues” and “Hell in a Bucket.”

He contributed to some 30 Grateful Dead songs in all, many with the guitarist and singer Bob Weir, a founding member, and others with the keyboardists Brent Mydland and Vince Welnick, who were later additions to the group.

Mr. Barlow said he had decided to try his hand at writing lyrics mostly to attract women. “I thought it was a misuse of the holy gift of poetry,” he said. “Then I realized, this is what poetry has always been for.”

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He was born on Oct. 3, 1947, in northwestern Wyoming, near Pinedale, on a ranch that a great-uncle had started in 1907. His parents were Norman Barlow, a Republican state legislator, and the former Miriam Jenkins.

John attended a one-room elementary school. Brought up in the Mormon faith, he was barred from watching television until he was in the sixth grade.

As a rambunctious teenager prone to discipline and academic lapses, he was dispatched by his parents to Fountain Valley School in Colorado. He described it as “a great place for people who are intelligent and intractable.”

He forged a lifelong friendship there with Mr. Weir, a guitar-toting fellow student who would found the Grateful Dead with Mr. Garcia and others in 1965.

As a student at Wesleyan University in Connecticut, Mr. Barlow took LSD trips with the Harvard psychologist Timothy Leary in Millbrook, N.Y., where Dr. Leary and others were living in a grand Georgian house. He graduated in 1969 with a degree in comparative religion.

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Passing up an opportunity to attend Harvard Law School, Mr. Barlow embarked instead on a journey to India and other destinations to complete a novel, which was never published.

A memoir, “Mother American Night: My Life in Crazy Times,” which Mr. Barlow wrote with Robert Greenfield, is to be published this year.

Mr. Barlow joined the Grateful Dead as a nonresident lyricist in the early 1970s. In 1972, after his father died, he returned to Wyoming to manage the family’s debt-ridden ranch, the Bar Cross Land & Livestock Company. (Jaqueline Onassis sent John F. Kennedy Jr. to work as a wrangler there in 1978.) Mr. Barlow remained there for almost 20 years while continuing to contribute lyrics to the Grateful Dead.

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Mr. Barlow in 1996, a year after the Grateful Dead disbanded. He wrote lyrics for about 30 of the band’s songs.Credit...Tom LaPoint/Albany Times Union, via Associated Press

In Wyoming, he was chairman of the Sublette County Republican Party for a time and a coordinator for the 1978 congressional campaign of Dick Cheney, whose conservative politics Mr. Barlow later disavowed.

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His 1977 marriage to Elaine Parker ended in divorce. In 1994 his fiancé, Dr. Cynthia Horner, died suddenly. His survivors include three daughters, Amelia, Anna and Leah, and a granddaughter.

When Mr. Barlow turned 30, he drew up what he called 25 “Principles of Adult Behavior.” No. 15 was “Avoid the pursuit of happiness. Seek to define your mission and pursue that.”

His preoccupation with the internet dated from the mid-1980s, when he began using a computer to manage the ranch’s finances. In 1986 he became a director of the WELL (the initials stand for Whole Earth ’Lectronic Link), an online community that drew members from the worlds of music, publishing and technology.

“On the WELL, he is the No. 1 digital Deadhead, equal parts beat poet and P. T. Barnum,” Craig Bromberg wrote in The New York Times Magazine in 1991.

Mr. Barlow, an emeritus fellow of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University, was also a founder of the Freedom of the Press Foundation in San Francisco, which promotes adversarial reporting and internet advocacy. The foundation’s president is Edward Snowden, the former government intelligence analyst who leaked secret documents to journalists in 2013.

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Yet for all Mr. Barlow’s internet advocacy, there were limits to his own internet use. He came to complain about feeling “constantly oppressed by all of the beeping and buzzing and whining” of computers, and by “discussion groups on the net, which I found very easy to leave once the signal-to-noise ratio deteriorated to the point where I didn’t dig it any more.”

Still, in 1996 he issued a declaration of independence for — not from — the internet.

It proclaimed: “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.”

He championed not only a right to speak freely on the web but also what he called “a right to know” all the information that it offers. And he endorsed the creation of communities through encounters in cyberspace.

But he warned against “the modern plague of boredom,” which he attributed to society’s desire to homogenize human experience, from fast food to television.

“I remember one of the few truly Buddhist things that my very non-Buddhist Wyoming mother said to me when I was little,” he told the social theorist bell hooks in 1995 on lionsroar .com, a Buddhist website. “I’d complain about being bored and she’d say, ‘Anyone who’s bored isn’t paying close enough attention.’ ”

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"A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace" is a widely distributed[when?] early paper on the incompatibility of current governments with the rapidly growing Internet. Commissioned for the online project 24 Hours in Cyberspace, it was written by John Perry Barlow, a founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and published online on February 8, 1996, from Davos, Switzerland.[1] It was written primarily in response to the passing into law of the Telecommunications Act of 1996 in the United States. In 2014, the Department of Records recorded and released audio and video content of Barlow reading the Declaration.[2][3]

Content

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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.

— John Perry Barlow, "A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace"

The declaration sets out, in sixteen short paragraphs, a rebuttal to government of the Internet by any outside force, specifically the United States. It states that the United States did not have the consent of the governed to apply laws to the Internet, and that the Internet was outside any country's borders. Instead, the Internet was developing its own social contracts to determine how to handle its problems, based on the Golden Rule. It does this in language evocative of the United States Declaration of Independence and obliquely cites it in its final paragraphs. Although the paper mentions the Telecommunications Act, it also accuses China, Germany, France, Russia, Singapore, and Italy of stifling the Internet.[4]

Background

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At the time the paper was written, Barlow had already written extensively on the Internet and its social and legal phenomena,[5] as well as being a founding member of the Electronic Frontier Foundation.[6] The work he was known best for previously, "The Economy of Ideas", published March 1994 in Wired magazine, also made allusions to Thomas Jefferson and some of the ideas he wrote about in his declaration.

Critical response

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Because of its subject matter, Barlow's work quickly became famous and widely distributed on the Internet. Within three months, an estimated 5,000 websites had copies of the declaration.[7] At nine months, that number was estimated to be 40,000.[8] To approach Barlow's vision of a self-governing Internet, the Cyberspace Law Institute set up a virtual magistrate, now hosted by the Chicago-Kent College of Law. Magistrates would be appointed by the institute and other legal groups to solve online disputes.[7] The declaration has been criticized for internal inconsistencies.[9] The declaration's assertion that 'cyberspace' is a place removed from the physical world has also been challenged by people who point to the fact that the Internet is always linked to its underlying geography.[10]

Outside the Internet, the response was less positive. Larry Irving, the Assistant Secretary of Commerce, said that a lack of safeguards would "slow down the growth of what is likely to be a major boon for consumers and business".[7] In the online magazine HotWired, one columnist referred to his document as simply "hogwash".[11]

By 2002, the number of sites copying the declaration was estimated to have dropped to 20,000.[12] In 2004, Barlow reflected on his 1990s work, specifically regarding his optimism. His response was that "we all get older and smarter".[13] But a 2016 article in Wired insisted, "Barlow himself wants to be clear: He stands by his words just as much today." It quotes Barlow as saying, "The main thing I was declaring was that cyberspace is naturally immune to sovereignty and always would be. I believed that was true then, and I believe it’s true now."[14]

See also

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References

[edit]
  1. ^ "John Perry Barlow: Is Cyberspace Still Anti-Sovereign?". 12 February 2018. Archived from the original on 10 February 2018. Retrieved 21 April 2017.
  2. ^ "Department of Records". www.departmentofrecords.co. Archived from the original on 2017-07-04. Retrieved 2015-03-08.
  3. ^ "Limited edition vinyl: John Perry Barlow reads "A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace" / Boing Boing". boingboing.net. 8 December 2014.
  4. ^ Barlow, John Perry (1996-02-08). "A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace". Retrieved 2017-02-23.
  5. ^ Ley, Michael. "DBLP: John Perry Barlow". Archived from the original on 25 February 2007. Retrieved 2007-02-09.
  6. ^ "EFF: Board of Directors". Archived from the original on 6 February 2007. Retrieved 2007-02-09.
  7. ^ Jump up to:a b c Yang, Catherine (1996-05-06). "Law Creeps Onto the Lawless Net". BusinessWeek (3474): 58–64. Archived from the original on June 28, 1997. Retrieved 2007-02-08.
  8. ^ Frezza, Bill (1996-11-01). "Can Public Network Computing Save Democracy". Network Computing: 35.
  9. ^ Evans, Woody (2016). "Cyberspace is the Child of the Industrial Age - Defining it as Independent is Nonsense". Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies. Archived from the original on 2016-11-05. Retrieved 2016-02-24.
  10. ^ Graham, Mark (2013-03-01). "Geography/internet: ethereal alternate dimensions of cyberspace or grounded augmented realities?". The Geographical Journal. 179 (2): 177–182. Bibcode:2013GeogJ.179..177G. doi:10.1111/geoj.12009. ISSN 0016-7398.
  11. ^ Cembalest, Robin (1996-09-20). "The Featherman File". Forward. C: 2.
  12. ^ Barlow, John Perry (22 January 2002). "John Perry Barlow Declaration for Defendants in MGM et al. v. Grokster et al". Archived from the original on 10 February 2007. Retrieved 9 February 2007.
  13. ^ Doherty, Brian (August–September 2004). "John Perry Barlow 2.0: The Thomas Jefferson of cyberspace reinvents his body — and his politics". Reason. Archived from the original on September 3, 2009.
  14. ^ Greenberg, Andy (February 2016). "It's Been 20 Years Since This Man Declared Cyberspace Independence". Wired. Archived from the original on February 11, 2016.

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