I grew up in New Delhi in the late 90s on a steady diet of 2600, phrack, BBSes and the EFF/internet. Two of the people I'd read a lot about and was very inspired by were JPB and Mitch Kapor, as founders of the EFF - and I decided one day that I'd like to actually reach out and talk to Barlow (I didn't actually have a goal in mind, now that I think about it).
Figuring that an email would never get a reply, I added him on AIM. To my utter surprise, he added me back - and after introducing myself as a high schooler who was a fan of the work he was doing, we communicated over the next year or so on a wide variety of topics that included open source, free software and the state of the internet in India at the time. For the next 10 years or so, when AIM was still active, he was one of the very few people still on my contacts list who would go "online" and "offline" with a regular cadence -- one of the only reasons I ever even logged into AIM was to (rarely) say hello :).
Of course, I stopped using the service a long time ago, and lost touch with him - but his declaration of independence of cyberspace was something that I leaned on when researching about internet censorship and policies a few years ago. I never did reach back out to him, and there was no pressing need to either.
On hearing the news, I'm reminded of how prescient and applicable his words have been to the issues and challenges that we see in the internet of today - but also how he personally upheld one beautifully phrased paragraph in particular, by virtue of his accepting a request from, and interacting with a random high schooler from half way across the world.
Cyberspace consists of transactions, relationships, and thought itself, arrayed like a standing wave in the web of our commu
nications. Ours is a world that is both everywhere and nowhere, but it is not where bodies live.
So, someone else who thinks that sometimes they can see souls in the light of beings’ eyes.
At least I know I’m not the only crazy person. Sadly it is entirely unprovable to others. It would be like trying to prove to someone who’s never eaten chocolate before, that chocolate is this totally awesome thing. (And what is chocolate, really, but an entirely subjective sublime experience?)
Funny thing, though, that I can say about it (and which is entirely in agreement with his account)... If you ever manage to see theirs, they will be able to see yours, too.
Rest easy, JPB. You’re hopefully back with your tribe.
I was at the 1993 NeXT Expo and remember seeing JPB. Never quite understood his background at that time. But was intrigued by his connection to Steve Jobs and NeXT.
This is an incredible story. Strangely enough this is what John Perry Barlow shared on Instagram last December: “I met my precious granddaughter today. She feels inexplicably familiar to me.”
I’d come to find myself in Portland. In the home of a stranger but there was no cause for alarm. This place felt like a home. It was real and a part of our collective universe. I never met my host, not once while I was there. She was a kindred spirit. Her home was warm and welcoming but I never knew her. On the last day of my trip, we managed to cross paths in the house, only in sound, never vision. She entered the shower, and I left to catch a plane to New York City. Like any other day.
In New York City, I found myself thinking of my time in Portland, feeling drawn to this woman. She sent me a friend request on Facebook. I immediately started rifling through pictures to try and see her. To understand what this feeling was. This draw. This pull. There was a picture with her and her father. I recognized the name but I didn’t know why. I immediately copied the name into google and was floored.
He was Cyberspace. A man who’s been with me my whole digital life. A dreamer. Someone who believes in more. Surreal clarity. A tangle of wires connecting this whole god damned universe caught us both and brought us together, for just that moment. I don’t know why the wires thought I was special, why I needed to know, but I’m happy they did.
I reflected on this moment. This connection that was both possible and impossible without this man and his daughter. Here’s to you JPB and Anna for being the conduit for these crazy electrical signals that had something to say. It was but a moment in passing in our collective universes, but one that left a mark.
"Cyberspace consists of transactions, relationships, and thought itself, arrayed like a standing wave in the web of our communications."
And:
"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."
Mike Godwin, who worked with Barlow at EFF back in the day, talked briefly about the Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace in a recent essay:
"Barlow, best known prior to his co-founding of the Electronic Frontier Foundation as a songwriter for the Grateful Dead, was writing to inspire activism, not to prescribe a new world order, and his goal was to be lyrical and aspirational, not legislative. Barlow wrote and published his “Declaration” in the short days and weeks after Congress passed, and President Clinton signed into law, a telecommunications bill that aimed, in part, to censor the internet. No serious person – and certainly not the Electronic Frontier Foundation and other organizations that successfully challenged the Communications Decency Act provisions of that bill – believed that cyberspace would be “automagically” independent of the terrestrial world and its governments. Barlow’s “Declaration” is best understood, as Wired described it two decades later, as a “rallying cry.” Similarly, nobody thinks “The Star-Spangled Banner” or “America the Beautiful” or “This Land Is Your Land” is a constitution. (And of course the original Declaration of Independence isn’t one either.)"
I've posted this on HN before, but his introduction to Birth of a Psychedelic Culture is highly worth reading. Among other things he talks about how (after entirely too much acid) he was planning on becoming America's first suicide bomber, to protest the Vietnam war, but got caught by his friends at the last minute:
Barlow's Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace [0] is one of the quintessential works that made the web the free place it is. What a great loss.
As a teenager, Barlow's writings inspired me and many others to do things such as paint our websites black to protest the Communications Decency Act, and write lots of actual letters which, in aggregate, effected change legally and socially.
In 2000 at Comdex, I remember Barlow saying that he had no love for the record companies - as a member of the Grateful Dead he had never received a royalty statement that didn't say he owed the company money. This was during the height of the war on MP3s when other artists were claiming they were being robbed at gunpoint or something.
The black-throated wind keeps on pouring in.
And it speaks of a life that passes like dew.
It's forced me to see that you've done better by me,
Better by me than I've done by you.
I am a huge Grateful Dead fan (I don't call myself a dead head because I was 9 when Jerry died, I never saw them play.) But I always loved John Perry Barlow's songs. My old band used to cover The Music Never Stopped and Cassidy, and my all time favorite dead song is Throwing Stones.
I didn't even know he was a big influencer in tech until I saw him appear on the Colbert Report representing the EFF.
My JPB story is short and relatively meaningless, but back when I first signed up for twitter I just followed a bunch of famous people and would every now and then attempt to engage them. The only one that ever replied back to me was John Perry Barlow, and it made my week. I had interfaced with true greatness. Rest in peace, John!
> In 1996, Barlow was invited to speak about his work in cyberspace to a middle school classroom at North Shore Country Day School, which was a highly influential event in the early life of student Aaron Swartz, as Swartz's father Robert recalls Aaron coming home that day as a changed person.[23][24]
I listened to this album for years and didn't understand that song until recently when I went back and listened again.
I don't think the song is about an agricultural town and a women fetching water as it first appears. I think it's symbolic. The women is dipping into the river of life and carrying a little part away with her. She is brown like the earth because in this case she is symbolic of the earth, i.e. the substrate on which life appears or develops. The drops of water in the reeds are individual instances of life, eventually they lose their individuality and return to the ocean. The plowman is sowing the earth. Etc. Etc.
Never heard of the guy until 2005 where CNET interviewed him about his interest in skype. Thus me and my friend downloaded Skype and called him. We chatted for five or ten minutes and he remained on my friends Skype since. Later found out he was in the Grateful Dead in same shape or form.
I never got to meet JPB, but I was lucky enough to attend his keynote at PyCon 2014 in Montreal. It's a great talk, should you have a spare 45 minutes.
He is (indirectly) responsible for the existence of a hackerspace in Fresno, CA. Last year a few of us got together to talk about starting a chapter of the Electronic Frontier Alliance. That conversation morphed into, "fuck it, let's just start a hackerspace."
That was a great little corner of the universe to occupy. That was the first talk at the first conference to which Chelsea and I traveled. And also where my friendship with you began in earnest. Incredible.
Such a loss. Who is the thought leader today to push back on the huge curtailment of online freedoms happening around the world. Even in the HN crowd, you see people succumbing to nationalism and making arguments to support their government's right to impose their court decisions on foreign jurisdictions in cyberspace. The problem isn't just the Great Firewall, it's stuff like Turkey or Thailand getting YouTube to take down a video criticizing their leader outside their region. It's European courts ruling their restrictions have to apply globally.
There's no leader really standing up and affirming the philosophical dream of the independence of cyberspace, as a place where people can gather freely to transact in virtual ways however they want. Rather, there's a huge backslide over the last 20 years.
I used to call him from time to time when I was a teenager, back in the early 1990s. He was always very open and neighborly and curious.
There are a number of sub-cultures that exist across the USA - redneck Wyoming ranchers, deadheads, San Francisco computer gearheads, civil libertarians - he seemed to belong to all of them. He was an easy person to say of that "he is one of the members of our community".
I know that him and Sean Parker were friends going way back. Someone told me a story that on the day Parker met Mark Zuckerberg etc. at the 66 restaurant, as portrayed in the movie the "Social Network", that Parker was crashing on Barlow's couch. I don't know if that is true or just part of the legend...
You would see him at various events around New York City when he was in the city. He often went to Florio's Pizzeria and Cigar Bar, holding court with people like Jaron Lanier and others.
A friend of mine said "He lived a life many would envy".
It's weird reading this because I very recently found out that a girl I went to high school with was his daughter. I had no idea back then (14+ years ago). This is a sad loss for the community and I'm sure his family as well.
One thing that was clear from following him on Twitter was he had a big heart, and in particular was a doting father to his (I think three) daughters. They all seemed to be very free spirits.
That's truly unfortunate. I've admired his work on behalf of electronic freedom since the start and have gotten to meet the gentleman once or twice, as we graduated from the same high-school separated by a few decades.
My condolences to his family and friends, and thanks for sharing him with us.
Funny tidbit: for a short while I thought they were two distinct people, and I kept telling myself 'wow, what a coincidence that two people have such an unlikely name'.
I knew of him through that before I knew of him through his activism; if that's what you mean. Wasn't until a few years ago, when I followed him on Twitter, that I found out about his other work. He was a remarkable man.
[+] [-] viksit|8 years ago|reply
I grew up in New Delhi in the late 90s on a steady diet of 2600, phrack, BBSes and the EFF/internet. Two of the people I'd read a lot about and was very inspired by were JPB and Mitch Kapor, as founders of the EFF - and I decided one day that I'd like to actually reach out and talk to Barlow (I didn't actually have a goal in mind, now that I think about it).
Figuring that an email would never get a reply, I added him on AIM. To my utter surprise, he added me back - and after introducing myself as a high schooler who was a fan of the work he was doing, we communicated over the next year or so on a wide variety of topics that included open source, free software and the state of the internet in India at the time. For the next 10 years or so, when AIM was still active, he was one of the very few people still on my contacts list who would go "online" and "offline" with a regular cadence -- one of the only reasons I ever even logged into AIM was to (rarely) say hello :).
Of course, I stopped using the service a long time ago, and lost touch with him - but his declaration of independence of cyberspace was something that I leaned on when researching about internet censorship and policies a few years ago. I never did reach back out to him, and there was no pressing need to either.
On hearing the news, I'm reminded of how prescient and applicable his words have been to the issues and challenges that we see in the internet of today - but also how he personally upheld one beautifully phrased paragraph in particular, by virtue of his accepting a request from, and interacting with a random high schooler from half way across the world.
RIP.[+] [-] Carioca|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|8 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] mattl|8 years ago|reply
https://www.thisamericanlife.org/74/transcript#act3
[+] [-] Cogito|8 years ago|reply
Almost skipped over it, so anyone else trailing through who catches this, go and read it.
[+] [-] klenwell|8 years ago|reply
Now that's a life lived.
[+] [-] kristofferR|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] andyjohnson0|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pmarreck|8 years ago|reply
At least I know I’m not the only crazy person. Sadly it is entirely unprovable to others. It would be like trying to prove to someone who’s never eaten chocolate before, that chocolate is this totally awesome thing. (And what is chocolate, really, but an entirely subjective sublime experience?)
Funny thing, though, that I can say about it (and which is entirely in agreement with his account)... If you ever manage to see theirs, they will be able to see yours, too.
Rest easy, JPB. You’re hopefully back with your tribe.
[+] [-] jacquesm|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jnaina|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] marrs|8 years ago|reply
EDIT: OK, just made it to the end. Didn't really feel I could leave the above as my entire reply to such a profound story.
[+] [-] nofilter|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] perch56|8 years ago|reply
https://www.instagram.com/p/Bc-zR3TlIoz/
[+] [-] kankroc|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] praneshp|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jeffpalmer|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] myth_drannon|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] joncrane|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sente|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] brianzelip|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lbotos|8 years ago|reply
I’d come to find myself in Portland. In the home of a stranger but there was no cause for alarm. This place felt like a home. It was real and a part of our collective universe. I never met my host, not once while I was there. She was a kindred spirit. Her home was warm and welcoming but I never knew her. On the last day of my trip, we managed to cross paths in the house, only in sound, never vision. She entered the shower, and I left to catch a plane to New York City. Like any other day.
In New York City, I found myself thinking of my time in Portland, feeling drawn to this woman. She sent me a friend request on Facebook. I immediately started rifling through pictures to try and see her. To understand what this feeling was. This draw. This pull. There was a picture with her and her father. I recognized the name but I didn’t know why. I immediately copied the name into google and was floored.
He was Cyberspace. A man who’s been with me my whole digital life. A dreamer. Someone who believes in more. Surreal clarity. A tangle of wires connecting this whole god damned universe caught us both and brought us together, for just that moment. I don’t know why the wires thought I was special, why I needed to know, but I’m happy they did.
I reflected on this moment. This connection that was both possible and impossible without this man and his daughter. Here’s to you JPB and Anna for being the conduit for these crazy electrical signals that had something to say. It was but a moment in passing in our collective universes, but one that left a mark.
[+] [-] shams93|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pixelmonkey|8 years ago|reply
https://www.eff.org/cyberspace-independence
I always loved these bits:
"Cyberspace consists of transactions, relationships, and thought itself, arrayed like a standing wave in the web of our communications."
And:
"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."
RIP.
[+] [-] jdp23|8 years ago|reply
"Barlow, best known prior to his co-founding of the Electronic Frontier Foundation as a songwriter for the Grateful Dead, was writing to inspire activism, not to prescribe a new world order, and his goal was to be lyrical and aspirational, not legislative. Barlow wrote and published his “Declaration” in the short days and weeks after Congress passed, and President Clinton signed into law, a telecommunications bill that aimed, in part, to censor the internet. No serious person – and certainly not the Electronic Frontier Foundation and other organizations that successfully challenged the Communications Decency Act provisions of that bill – believed that cyberspace would be “automagically” independent of the terrestrial world and its governments. Barlow’s “Declaration” is best understood, as Wired described it two decades later, as a “rallying cry.” Similarly, nobody thinks “The Star-Spangled Banner” or “America the Beautiful” or “This Land Is Your Land” is a constitution. (And of course the original Declaration of Independence isn’t one either.)"
https://www.cato-unbound.org/2018/01/04/mike-godwin/free-spe...
[+] [-] JDW1023|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] daveheq|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Alex3917|8 years ago|reply
http://realitysandwich.com/34204/beginning_birth_psychedelic...
Fortunately for the rest of us he ended up co-founding the EFF instead.
[+] [-] mturmon|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alex_young|8 years ago|reply
As a teenager, Barlow's writings inspired me and many others to do things such as paint our websites black to protest the Communications Decency Act, and write lots of actual letters which, in aggregate, effected change legally and socially.
In 2000 at Comdex, I remember Barlow saying that he had no love for the record companies - as a member of the Grateful Dead he had never received a royalty statement that didn't say he owed the company money. This was during the height of the war on MP3s when other artists were claiming they were being robbed at gunpoint or something.
[0] https://www.eff.org/cyberspace-independence
[+] [-] insaneirish|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] AustinG08|8 years ago|reply
I didn't even know he was a big influencer in tech until I saw him appear on the Colbert Report representing the EFF.
My JPB story is short and relatively meaningless, but back when I first signed up for twitter I just followed a bunch of famous people and would every now and then attempt to engage them. The only one that ever replied back to me was John Perry Barlow, and it made my week. I had interfaced with true greatness. Rest in peace, John!
[+] [-] linkmotif|8 years ago|reply
— https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Perry_Barlow
[+] [-] jacquesm|8 years ago|reply
http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2011/Jan-21.html
Worth living by.
[+] [-] sankyo|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mythrwy|8 years ago|reply
It's such a beautiful piece of music. Really gets down deep into the nature of life.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IN6mjNMNytY
https://play.google.com/music/preview/Tuuldprggcev2wah45v27l...
I listened to this album for years and didn't understand that song until recently when I went back and listened again.
I don't think the song is about an agricultural town and a women fetching water as it first appears. I think it's symbolic. The women is dipping into the river of life and carrying a little part away with her. She is brown like the earth because in this case she is symbolic of the earth, i.e. the substrate on which life appears or develops. The drops of water in the reeds are individual instances of life, eventually they lose their individuality and return to the ocean. The plowman is sowing the earth. Etc. Etc.
[+] [-] jackaroe78|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] staunch|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] paul7986|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dmpayton|8 years ago|reply
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QGVzb5YXmeo
He is (indirectly) responsible for the existence of a hackerspace in Fresno, CA. Last year a few of us got together to talk about starting a chapter of the Electronic Frontier Alliance. That conversation morphed into, "fuck it, let's just start a hackerspace."
So thanks JPB. Rest well.
[+] [-] jMyles|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cromwellian|8 years ago|reply
There's no leader really standing up and affirming the philosophical dream of the independence of cyberspace, as a place where people can gather freely to transact in virtual ways however they want. Rather, there's a huge backslide over the last 20 years.
[+] [-] Ologn|8 years ago|reply
There are a number of sub-cultures that exist across the USA - redneck Wyoming ranchers, deadheads, San Francisco computer gearheads, civil libertarians - he seemed to belong to all of them. He was an easy person to say of that "he is one of the members of our community".
I know that him and Sean Parker were friends going way back. Someone told me a story that on the day Parker met Mark Zuckerberg etc. at the 66 restaurant, as portrayed in the movie the "Social Network", that Parker was crashing on Barlow's couch. I don't know if that is true or just part of the legend...
You would see him at various events around New York City when he was in the city. He often went to Florio's Pizzeria and Cigar Bar, holding court with people like Jaron Lanier and others.
A friend of mine said "He lived a life many would envy".
[+] [-] dopamean|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ad_hominem|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wavefunction|8 years ago|reply
My condolences to his family and friends, and thanks for sharing him with us.
[+] [-] chrisseldo|8 years ago|reply
A champion of freedom. RIP.
[+] [-] tkamat29|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jacquesm|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cjbramble|8 years ago|reply