Internet 50th Anniversary/Biography of John Perry Barlow

John Perry Barlow was not among the honorable but little-known order of men who made the Internet possible. He did not design any of its infrastructure, or code any of its protocols. No, his name is forever in the hearts of all freedom-loving Internet users, for he provided a service infinitely more valuable: he gave the Internet an ideology to fight for, demands to ask for, and rights to preserve for.

His ancestors were Mormon pioneers, and he was raised as a Mormon. They were descended from English who had been relentlessly clearing new land since the 1600's. His family had lived in Wyoming since 1875. His childhood was that of the stereotypical grandfather who complains that "kids today have it too easy." He rode on horseback for three and a half miles every day to attend a one-room schoolhouse. Every winter he endured wind chill factors of as low as -70 Fahrenheit. He grew up in a community of men and women forced together by the necessity of survival, deeply distrustful of any authority, self-reliant but always ready to lend a helping hand, and tolerant of each other's eccentricities, in short, Americans.

Barlow went to an eastern university, but after his father suffered a stroke he went home and took up his inheritance: the ranch. For 17 years he worked on horseback, trying in vain to compete against encroaching agricultural corporations. In his spare time, he wrote a few songs for a band called the Grateful Dead. A fan of this band introduced him to the very first BBS: the Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link, or the WELL. He felt like he had found a new world, that he had rediscovered the Wyoming small town he had grown up in. Here was a community based on interest, not necessity. And it was thriving.

He realized that he could never catch up to 21st century technology with 19th century methods in 1989, and sold his ranch. An FBI agent visited him in 1990, and demanded he hand over information regarding someone who had allegedly spread Macintosh source code online. He called two friends who had been visited by other agents, and by the next day they were sitting across a desk from a young New York lawyer, jealous of their natural privileges, and ready to defend the Fourth Amendment on the Internet.

Two months later they founded the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), a nod to the frontier Barlow was now setting out to expand. The EFF helped multiple users of the Internet defend themselves, and helped greatly to delineate Internet rights in the early 1990s.

But as long as the Internet is free, men will still say this was Barlow's finest hour: while at Davos, Switzerland in 1996, upon hearing that Congress was about to pass a bill banning "indecency" on the Internet, Barlow wrote the following in a single sitting:

"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.

We have no elected government, nor are we likely to have one, so I address you with no greater authority than that with which liberty itself always speaks. I declare the global social space we are building to be naturally independent of the tyrannies you seek to impose on us. You have no moral right to rule us nor do you possess any methods of enforcement we have true reason to fear.

Governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. You have neither solicited nor received ours. We did not invite you. You do not know us, nor do you know our world. Cyberspace does not lie within your borders. Do not think that you can build it, as though it were a public construction project. You cannot. It is an act of nature and it grows itself through our collective actions.

You have not engaged in our great and gathering conversation, nor did you create the wealth of our marketplaces. You do not know our culture, our ethics, or the unwritten codes that already provide our society more order than could be obtained by any of your impositions.

You claim there are problems among us that you need to solve. You use this claim as an excuse to invade our precincts. Many of these problems don't exist. Where there are real conflicts, where there are wrongs, we will identify them and address them by our means. We are forming our own Social Contract. This governance will arise according to the conditions of our world, not yours. Our world is different.

Cyberspace consists of transactions, relationships, and thought itself, arrayed like a standing wave in the web of our communications. Ours is a world that is both everywhere and nowhere, but it is not where bodies live.

We are creating a world that all may enter without privilege or prejudice accorded by race, economic power, military force, or station of birth.

We are creating a world where anyone, anywhere may express his or her beliefs, no matter how singular, without fear of being coerced into silence or conformity.

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.

Our identities have no bodies, so, unlike you, we cannot obtain order by physical coercion. We believe that from ethics, enlightened self-interest, and the commonweal, our governance will emerge. Our identities may be distributed across many of your jurisdictions. The only law that all our constituent cultures would generally recognize is the Golden Rule. We hope we will be able to build our particular solutions on that basis. But we cannot accept the solutions you are attempting to impose.

In the United States, you have today created a law, the Telecommunications Reform Act, which repudiates your own Constitution and insults the dreams of Jefferson, Washington, Mill, Madison, DeToqueville, and Brandeis. These dreams must now be born anew in us.

You are terrified of your own children, since they are natives in a world where you will always be immigrants. Because you fear them, you entrust your bureaucracies with the parental responsibilities you are too cowardly to confront yourselves. In our world, all the sentiments and expressions of humanity, from the debasing to the angelic, are parts of a seamless whole, the global conversation of bits. We cannot separate the air that chokes from the air upon which wings beat.

In China, Germany, France, Russia, Singapore, Italy and the United States, you are trying to ward off the virus of liberty by erecting guard posts at the frontiers of Cyberspace. These may keep out the contagion for a small time, but they will not work in a world that will soon be blanketed in bit-bearing media.

Your increasingly obsolete information industries would perpetuate themselves by proposing laws, in America and elsewhere, that claim to own speech itself throughout the world. These laws would declare ideas to be another industrial product, no more noble than pig iron. In our world, whatever the human mind may create can be reproduced and distributed infinitely at no cost. The global conveyance of thought no longer requires your factories to accomplish.

These increasingly hostile and colonial measures place us in the same position as those previous lovers of freedom and self-determination who had to reject the authorities of distant, uninformed powers. We must declare our virtual selves immune to your sovereignty, even as we continue to consent to your rule over our bodies. We will spread ourselves across the Planet so that no one can arrest our thoughts.

We will create a civilization of the Mind in Cyberspace. May it be more humane and fair than the world your governments have made before."

This "Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace" spread like wildfire over the young Internet. Barlow believed it was too ambitious in his later years, but he never renounced it. Nor should it ever be. It is a document of lofty aspirations, that will always be aimed for, and never reached.

Barlow continued to serve on EFF's Board of Directors until his death. Perhaps we may imagine his disappointment when smartphones arrived on the scene with long-winded terms of service allowing their users to happily and conveniently sign their rights away with the tap of a button. How did he feel about the data leaks, Gamergate, and the backlash about it? We may envision, and thank him for making us aware that we are free to do so.

He died on February 7, 2018, peacefully in his sleep. Perhaps it is telling that even followers of QAnon claimed his death was a "deep state conspiracy", despite him calling Donald Trump a "toxic asshole" upon his election. He was the Thomas Jefferson of the Internet, without owning any slaves, and the Thomas Paine of the Internet, without getting too far ahead of his time. The following stanza describes Oliver Cromwell, but could be more aptly applied to a man who killed no Irish:

"When such heroic virtue heaven sets out, The stars, like commons, sullenly obey, Because it drains them, when it comes about, And therefore is a tax they seldom pay."--John Dryden.