John Perry Barlow, who died on February
7th, helped shape how we think about digital rights. Here, the OU’s
Mike Richards introduces a short obituary by John’s friend, Cory
Doctorow.
John Perry Barlow died peacefully in his sleep on February 7, 2018,
at the age of 70, in the midst of global turmoil about the nature and
destiny of the information systems he had devoted his life to improving.
Barlow had lived an odd and adventurous life, scion of a rural
political family; cowboy-poet at an American liberal arts college;
lyricist for the legendary jam band The Grateful Dead; co-founder of the
Electronic Frontier Foundation (a charitable pressure group); and
biotech entrepreneur devoted to using single-celled organisms to convert
sunshine and sewage into useful fuel.
Barlow was famous several times over, but one of his landmark claims
to fame was the 1996 “Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace,” a
piece of soaring, poetic rhetoric demanding that the internet be treated
as a place where humanity could make common cause, where ideas could be
debated and improved, where bridges could be built and walls
demolished.
Twenty-some-years on, Barlow and his Declaration became a punching
bag for a certain species of historical revisionist, a new crop of
techno-dystopians who insisted that Barlow – and the people he
inspired, and the organisation he founded – were hopelessly naive to
think that the internet would automatically be a force for good, rather
than the trolling, surveillant, controlling cesspit of crime, racism and
harassment that we struggle with today.
But I knew Barlow. Reading his Declaration changed the course of my
life when I was just starting out as an internet developer in the early
1990s, and when I met him and went to work for the Electronic Frontier
Foundation, I had the incredible and inspiring opportunity to affirm my
first impression of his philosophy: the internet would only be a force
for good if we committed ourselves endlessly to that cause, and
otherwise, it could go horribly, horribly wrong.
Barlow – and his pioneering colleagues like Mitch Kapor and John
Gilmore – founded EFF because they were simultaneously excited about
the power of the internet to remake the world for the better, and
starkly terrified about how badly it would go if no one took
responsibility for fighting for it.
Barlow understood that “information wants to be free” wasn’t an
anthropomorphising statement about the desires of an abstraction like
“information” – it was a shorthand for “*PEOPLE* want to be free, and
in an information society, freedom for people is impossible without a
free, fair and open information infrastructure.”
The internet is not and never was the most important fight in our
world: addressing racial and gender bias, averting climate catastrophe
and addressing gross income inequality are all far more important than
the internet ever was. But the internet is the terrain where that
struggle will be waged – which makes the internet fight the most
foundational one, the fight on whose outcome all the other fights ride.
Barlow understood that – and he inspired generations that will come after him.
