John Perry Barlow
John Perry Barlow
John Perry Barlowis an American poet and essayist, a retired Wyoming cattle rancher, and a cyberlibertarian political activist who has been associated with both the Democratic and Republican parties. He is also a former lyricist for the Grateful Dead and a founding member of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Freedom of the Press Foundation. As of 2016, he is a Fellow Emeritus at Harvard University's Berkman Center for Internet and Society, where he has maintained an affiliation since 1998. He...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionWriter
Date of Birth3 October 1947
CountryUnited States of America
New solutions win by virtue of adoption, and they don't get adopted if they're bad solutions.
The Corporate impulse for human uniformity instills shame at difference and, thus, the contemporary zeal for privacy.
I've begun to wonder if we wouldn't also regard spelunkers as desperate criminals if AT&T owned all the caves.
I mean I look forward to the day when I can be Republican again.
I support freedom of expression, no matter whose, so I oppose DDoS attacks regardless of their target... they're the poison gas of cyberspace.
The government targets 'Anonymous' for the same reason it targets al-Qaida - because they're the enemy.
It didn't matter what we did or where we did it as long as we were together. We knew we'd found what most people either pursue in years of futile search or dismiss as a fantasy at the outset: the missing half of ourselves. The real thing.
The Internet may well disempower the nation state, but at the same time, it also strengthens certain specific state functions - like surveillance. As a political entity, it doesn't empower the nation sate. It creates the availability of much more data than the digestive system of the nation state could possibly assimilate.
Any powerful technology has sauce for the goose and the gander... It's just an extension of humanity.
The 'Total Information Awareness' project is truly diabolical - mostly because of the legal changes which have made it possible in the first place. As a consequence of the Patriot Act, government now has access to all sorts of private and commercial databases that were previously off limits.
The Internet amplifies power in all respects. It can grossly exaggerate the power of the individual.
Google, Amazon, Apple. Any number of cloud providers and computer service providers who can increasingly limit your access to your own information, control all your processing, take away your data if they want to, and observe everything you do; in a way, that does give them some leverage over your own life.
I think that humor is part of what saves us from despair.
It's widely assumed that you can't compete with free, and that seems like a reasonable thing to think. But this has not been my experience.