I met John Perry Barlow in 1999, and I was awestruck: here was the legend whose Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace
had profoundly changed my life, making me realize that the nascent
internet that I’d dropped out of university to devote my life to could
be more than a communications tool: it could be a revolutionary force
for good.
Within minutes of meeting Barlow, he’d put me at my ease, with his
larger-than-life magnanimity, his whisky-gravel voice, his dry wit, and
his endlessly genuine curiosity. When I took at job at EFF a few years
later and Barlow became my kinda-sorta boss, I discovered the immense
joys (and inarguable frustrations) of working with him: Barlow
challenged received wisdom, made you revisit your assumptions and look
at problems sideways and upside-down to get the lay of them. I argued
with Barlow a lot, and lost more than once, and was always better for
it.
In the decades since had the enormous honor and pleasure of becoming
Barlow’s friend: trekking across the Playa with him at Burning Man,
speaking alongside him at conferences on three continents, writing him into a novel, making his Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace the McGuffin of a short story, asking him to write an introduction to one of my books, bringing him to my class for a guest lecture, and, just recently, helping to raise money to defray his medical bills after he became terminally ill.
As EFF’s Cindy Cohn – who introduced me to Barlow – writes, Barlow has
been recently vilified as a naif who failed to foresee the power of the
internet to control and censor, to troll and dox, but nothing could be
farther from the truth. Barlow wrote the Declaration and co-founded the
Electronic Frontier Foundation precisely because he foresaw
those possibilities: he saw that the world would be remade by
general-purpose networks tied to general-purpose computers, and that
unless we committed ourselves to making that network free, and fair, and
open, that it would give the powerful and wicked the power to exert
unprecedented, near-total control over our lives.
Today, Barlow is dead, and his vision is vindicated: the risks Barlow
foresaw (along with other EFF founders like John Gilmore and Mitch
Kapor) are more imminent than ever; the organization that he started and
the movement he kicked off has never been more badly needed.
I find it hard to believe that I’ll never talk to Barlow again, but I’m
sure I’ll never stop having dialogs with him in my mind, as I’ve done so
many times over the years. Barlow has a way of taking up residence in
your thoughts, and I know he’ll never leave mine.
