78 The EconomistFebruary 24th 2018
I
T WAS late, 1985, before John Perry Bar-
low got into computers. He’d bought a
word processor to keep things efficient as
he ran the family ranch, and because he
wanted a machine that would print out his
lyrics for the Grateful Dead really nicely on
paper. (Two jobs, two hats.) Butthen he
procured a Macintosh and a modem, the
first ever seen in Sublette County, Wyo-
ming, and discovered that, through this lit-
tle blinking box and the tendril of a lan-
dline, he could join an extraordinary
community. In the WELL(for Whole Earth
‘Lectronic Link), one of the first virtual bul-
letin boards, he moved like a cave fish,
blindly, among entities without bodies.
They were things of words alone, free-
floating wispsof thought, in a perpetual
town meeting of unleashed opinions.
Everything was possible, and almost
everything allowed, in a suddenly limit-
less world. As he wrote for the Grateful
Dead in “Cassidy”, his most famous song,
he was “a child of boundless seas”.
He saw what other people had not yet
seen, that this was a new space—one to
which he quickly applied an existing term,
cyberspace, and his own metaphor, the
electronic frontier. Here was a land that
was unmapped, unregulated, crammed
with unimaginable resources, up for grabs.
Notions of trespass did not apply. Therewas nothingmaterial here, and thus no
property, intellectual or otherwise; no con-
text, no fixed identity. Early settlers could
well turn out to be sociopaths or outlaws.
But the wild, rowdy liberty of this place
had to be protected.
From 1990, when he co-founded the
Electronic Frontier Foundation in response
to Secret Service raids on games compa-
nies and the homes of hackers, digital
rights became his life. In 1996, with Con-
gress hunkering down to defend national
security, privacy, copyright and “decency”,
all those obsolete guard-posts, he flung out
in fury “A Declaration of the Indepen-
dence of Cyberspace”:
Governments ofthe Industrial World, you
weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from
Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On be-
half 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 gath-
er...I declare the global social space we are
building to be naturally independent of the
tyrannies you seek to impose on us.
Having started off as a stout Wyoming Re-
publican, then a libertarian, he was an an-
archist online. No government was need-
ed, because there was governance already:
the good behaviour of most people who
used it, and the freedom-loving intentions
of those who had designed it. In this vastcommunity, where real-space coercion
couldn’t hold, order flowed from collective
ethical deliberation. There was nothing to
fear. He had met hackers like Phiber Optik,
with their pumped-up diatribes online,
only to find that over dinner they looked as
dangerous as ducks. His mission, therefore,
was to lead the doubters and internet-op-
pressors gently into the new territory, dis-
arming them with hiscowboy hat and
beard and with language which a poet or a
cowhand could understand. He prosely-
tised all over the world.Permanently rewired
As it turned out, the internet resembled the
most transforming moments of his life. As
a boy in the Bar Cross ranch house, isolat-
ed in 22,000 scrubby acres, he had de-
voured a 20-volume children’s encyclope-
dia in which, as on the Web, all knowledge
seemed contained. Sitting a decade later
on the floor at Timothy Leary’s ashram in
Millbrook, watching fractals bounce off
the walls afterdroppingacid for the first
time, he realised the complete connected-
ness of everything. His work with the
Grateful Dead, who let fans freely record
their concerts, convinced him that the best
way to raise demand for a product was just
to give it away. When writing some 30
songs for them with his childhood friend,
Bob Weir, he came to see that songs had
their own life, independent of their creator,
changing each time the band played them,
and gathering accretions of meaning from
the whole community of Deadheads. Back
on the ranch, he helped ensure the free
flow of water round his irrigation district.
He saw all these capabilities in the Web
yet also, as years passed, limitations. It did
not float quite so sublimely free of the ma-
terial world as he had claimed in the “Dec-
laration”. At the same time, the informa-
tion it spread lacked the spark of physi
cality: looking folk in the eye, making year-
ling cattle scatter like mercury hit with a
hammer. He had to give his lectures as a
material being to get the impact he wanted.
Meanwhile that enlightened community
of Web-users, that civilisation of the Mind,
seemed slow to form, to say the least.
As for whether the voyage into cyber-
space marked a new age, a turning-point in
history after which nation states would
wither and humans would be perma-
nently rewired, he hoped it was. He had
hoped before, in 1967 in Haight-Ashbury,
where the Summer of Love shed all con-
straints social, legal and sexual and he
found himself in a world falling apart,
longing for authority of any sort to reassert
itself. But he trusted that everything in the
universe tended towards the good, that to-
tal liberty was the only climate in which
men and women could flourish, and that,
if he was wrong, a free cyberspace would
still have been worth battling for. 7On the cyber-frontier
John Perry Barlow, songwriter and internet Utopian, died on February7th, aged 70ObituaryJohn Perry Barlow