
A Tribute to John Perry Barlow - js2
https://www.economist.com/blogs/prospero/2018/02/music-never-stopped
======
DanielKehoe
Barlow and I worked together in 1991 at NeXTWORLD magazine as contributing
editors. One day I set up USENET on his NeXT computer at his home on Potrero
Hill (on a day when Spalding Gray dropped by for lunch) and later I tipped him
off about the new WorldWideWeb a few days after TimBL first posted about the
project on comp.sys.next.announce. He said (to Mitch Kapor), it "sounds rather
like Project Xanadu emerging from the Matrix almost without design. This could
be cool..." [1]

Many people naively tell me that Steve Jobs is their hero. I wish I would meet
more who aspire to live like John Perry Barlow. He was good-natured, kind, and
lifted everyone up around him (we posted his "Adult Principles" [2] on all the
cubicles at NeXTWORLD). He had a noble heart; he made choices in his life that
were not comfortable or safe but lived a principled life and found his own
way. Above all, he had a sense of the tenuous dignity of man (humankind, if
you prefer) and the need to defend ourselves with every means at our disposal,
including poetry and theatre. I think the battle may be lost and he may be the
last of his kind that I meet.

[1]
[http://www.fortuityconsulting.com/images/barlow.gif](http://www.fortuityconsulting.com/images/barlow.gif)
[2] [https://www.mail-
archive.com/silklist@lists.hserus.net/msg08...](https://www.mail-
archive.com/silklist@lists.hserus.net/msg08034.html)

~~~
js2
Thank you for sharing. The “Adult Principles” is worth its own submission
here.

~~~
grzm
Indeed. Less than 2 weeks ago, over 50 comments:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16328995](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16328995)

------
weisser
I also recommend this Wired tribute to JPB written by his friend Steven Levy:
[https://www.wired.com/story/mourning-john-perry-barlow-
the-b...](https://www.wired.com/story/mourning-john-perry-barlow-the-bard-of-
the-internet/)

------
samcheng
A bunch of his (lyrical) work is available for free from the Internet Archive:

[https://archive.org/browse.php?collection=GratefulDead&field...](https://archive.org/browse.php?collection=GratefulDead&field=%2Fmetadata%2Fyear)

Here's a performance of the song mentioned in the article:

[https://archive.org/details/gd80-09-29.sbd.hinko.21926.sbeok...](https://archive.org/details/gd80-09-29.sbd.hinko.21926.sbeok.shnf/gd1980-09-29d1t04.shn)

~~~
nipplesurvey
1980 eh? bold choice.

------
coretx
paywalled

~~~
forgotmypw
The music never stopped

A tribute to John Perry Barlow

The son of America’s frontier—physical, psychedelic and digital—passes

Prospero Feb 18th 2018

by K.N.C.

HIS rough features resembled the hard Wyoming land from where he came.
Sandpaper skin, deep gorges across his forehead and wrinkles alongside the
temples like cracked, dry earth. A craggy, stubborn nose. But gentle eyes,
narrow as if formed by squinting into the sun over years.

John Perry Barlow, who died on February 7th, was a Grateful Dead lyricist,
cyber-pundit, cattle rancher and idealist. He embodied a vanishing America.
His lyrics, like his lifestyle, were a world of cowboys, nature and passions.
He was a literary heir to Walt Whitman, depicting a rugged American
individualism, romanticism and freedom as wide as the Lower 48, with his boots
pulled up and his hat worn low. “I have seen where the wolf has slept by the
silver stream/ I can tell by the mark he left you were in his dream/ Ah, child
of countless trees/ Ah, child of boundless seas/ What you are, what you're
meant to be” he wrote in the song “Cassidy” in 1972 with his childhood friend
Bob Weir, a guitarist and singer for the Grateful Dead. His words depicted the
freedom of the outlaw. Or it was the honour of the farmer in nature? Or it was
hints of the Vietnam War laced within the Biblical story of Esau?

To the middle-class suburban teenagers who tuned in, turned on and dropped
out, it seemed otherworldly. It was an era where the cowboy was replaced by
the long-haired hippie, riding a chopper instead of a steed, dangling a joint
rather than a revolver. But it was freedom all the same. The frontier was no
longer beyond the horizon, but found by grace of LSD, exploring the wilderness
within.

As a student on the East Coast, Mr Barlow dropped acid with Timothy Leary, and
introduced the Dead to that professorial father of psychedelia. He resisted
the call of Harvard Law School for a jaunt across India in search of a
different form of enlightenment. He fell into songwriting like he fell into
most things. In the 1970s he took over the family’s Wyoming ranch (and took in
a rowdy John Kennedy Jr as a cowpoke to straighten him out). To stay in touch
with friends in the coastal cities in the 1980s, he plugged a computer into a
modem and the modem into a phone line and dialed up the internet. It changed
his life. The WELL (for “Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link”) was a precursor to the
World Wide Web, where people could exchange written messages. It offered a new
frontier, new freedoms. He didn’t coin the term “cyberspace” but used it to
anoint the net.

By 1990, groups that hosted online content were getting raided by the feds
because of hacking or copyright infringement by their users. The Wild West
looked like it was becoming less free. Mr Barlow co-founded the Electronic
Frontier Foundation, now a major advocacy group. The rancher and staunch
Republican (he helped coordinate Dick Cheney's first congressional run) was
now the first internet activist.

As the internet mushroomed Mr Barlow was its prophet, invited around the world
to explain the new frontier to the suits. On February 8th 1996 in Davos,
Switzerland, he wrote his most famous and controversial canticle: “A
Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace”. To many youths just logging
on, his words were electrifying—a rallying cry to keep the new medium a
pristine Eden, an unsoiled frontier free of the wretchedness of “meatspace”:
governmental and commercial interests. 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. You have no
sovereignty where we gather...I declare the global social space we are
building to be naturally independent of the tyrannies you seek to impose on
us...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."

The media dubbed him “the Thomas Jefferson of Cyberspace”. Harvard Law School
made him a fellow. FutureBanker, a magazine, named him “One of the 25 Most
Influential People in Financial Services” despite his having nothing to do
with financial services.

Yet to the more polished wing of the technorati, his declaration was plain
looney. They had spent years serving on commissions, testifying before
Congress and speaking to boards of directors about the importance of bringing
law onto the network so that the internet could become a mainstream medium.
And here was Mr Barlow, the barrel-chested space-cowboy dressed in black and
trailed by groupies, spouting his poetic, juvenile pap.

Several years later The Economist dubbed it, perhaps unfairly, “a well-meaning
stunt that captured the spirit of the time” (see article). In an interview
with this newspaper on its 20th anniversary, he stated: “I will stand by much
of the document as written.” He mused: “Over the decades, it has been
continuously fashionable to make a straw man of my declaration, to hoist it up
as the sort of woolly-headed hippie nonsense you’d expect from techno-utopians
like me...It’s hardly the best thing I ever wrote and suffers many flaws, both
cosmetic and substantive. But I’ll live with it. And die with it, I guess.”

He mellowed in later years. A heart attack in 2015 unleashed predictable puns
on Twitter riffing on “grateful” and “dead.” After being prodded to write his
life’s story—“Mother American Night” is scheduled to be published in June, co-
written with Robert Greenfield—he joked to your correspondent that he suffered
from déjà pas vu: memories that he can recall that never actually happened, as
far as he and friends could deduce.

His critics could never see past his idealism. His fans, perhaps it can be
said, took him seriously not literally. He was a poet of frontiers and of
freedom, in whatever form they took. As he wrote in “Cassidy”: “Faring thee
well now/ Let your life proceed by its own design/ Nothing to tell now/ Let
the words be yours, I'm done with mine.”

