John Perry Barlow

Cofounder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation

• Born: October 3, 1947
• Birthplace: Cora, Sublette County, Wyoming
• Died: February 7, 2018
• Place of death: San Francisco, California

Primary Company/Organization: Electronic Frontier Foundation

Introduction

John Perry Barlow was one of the most influential political thinkers of the internet society. Over the course of a career when he was simultaneously a lyricist, lobbyist, essayist, and consultant, he never ceased to use his communication skills for protecting the constitutional rights of American “netizens.” A man of both ideas and action, Barlow helped found the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Widely acclaimed for his visionary insights, he was a source of inspiration for a generation of political thinkers specializing in new technologies.

Early Life

John Perry Barlow was born to a family of politicians on October 3, 1947, in Cora, Wyoming. The grandson of a Sublette County founder on his mother's side and the son of a Republican state legislator, he grew up in the middle of a 22,000-acre ranch and developed a passion for wide-open spaces.

As a teenager, Barlow and his friends were looking for ways to break the routine of life in a small town, when his father sent him off to the Fountain Military Academy in Colorado Springs, where he met Bob Weir, another rebellious teen, who would become a lifelong friend. With Weir playing the guitar and Barlow writing poetry, the two teenagers spent all their free time together. When Weir was expelled from the academy, Barlow immediately denounced an injustice and threatened to quit to show solidarity with his friend. He was persuaded to stay, however, and graduated in 1965.

Barlow enrolled at Wesleyan University, leaving his native region for the East Coast. While studying comparative religion, he took advantage of his academic years to explore new intellectual horizons and became a friend of psychologist and LSD advocate Timothy Leary. In 1967, he reconnected with his old friend Weir, who had helped form the music band the Grateful Dead. They discovered that they still shared similar political views and a vision of the world, which departed from social conventions. In 1969, Barlow graduated and left the continent for an initiatory journey in India.

Life's Work

With his father's health declining, Barlow put an end to his student life in 1970. He returned to the family ranch and took over its administration. There he met his future wife, a former classmate. Animated by his political convictions, Barlow embraced the fate of the family, engaging himself in the political life of his region. He notably served Dick Cheney as his Wyoming campaign coordinator during Cheney's 1978 congressional campaign and worked on a number of environmental issues, notably to pass the Wyoming Wilderness Act in 1984.

Given his political activism, Barlow was offered the chance to transform his ideas into action and to share them with the rest of the world. After clashing with Grateful Dead lyricist Bob Hunter, Barlow's old friend Weir asked him to write lyrics for the Grateful Dead. Barlow wrote “Mexicali Blues,” launching a string of more than twenty-five songs on which he and Weir would collaborate for the one of the most iconic bands of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s.

Traveling with the rest of the band from one concert venue to another, Barlow enjoyed an active social life and found a new way to extend his spectrum of relationships. Barlow's ranch quickly became a center of intellectual and social life, hosting celebrities such as Marlon Brando and John F. Kennedy, Jr.

In 1987, Barlow bought a computer to help with managing the ranch, just one year before he left the countryside for a two-bedroom house in Pinedale. At a moment when cyberspace was turning into a consensual reality in the Silicon Valley, and with a strong presence of Deadheads (fans of the Grateful Dead) online, he joined the Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link (WELL), a leading virtual community. With the possibility of getting in touch with the rest of the world, he became an active member and an enthusiast of the cyberspace culture.

Having lost the race for a state senate seat in 1989, Barlow had a rare opportunity to play a leading role on the political scene just one year later. In May 1990, the Secret Service launched a nationwide operation against alleged hackers and an agent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) questioned Barlow about his connections with the hacker community NuPrometheus. Barlow noticed the confusion of the federal administration about computers and networks and realized that freedom of speech could be endangered in emerging information networks. A few days later, Barlow was contacted by Mitch Kapor, the inventor of the spreadsheet program Lotus 1-2-3. Together, they asked for advice from one of New York's most distinguished constitutional law firms, which encouraged them to create a foundation. In June 1990, Barlow left a message for the WELL community, announcing his intention to create the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) to “fund, conduct, and support legal efforts to demonstrate that the Secret Service has exercised prior restraint on publications, limited free speech, conducted improper seizure of equipment and data, used undue force, and generally conducted itself in a fashion which is arbitrary, oppressive, and unconstitutional.” This generated publicity, earning Barlow access to major figures in the computer industry and to the financial support of John Gilmore and Steve Wozniak, among others.

While supporting the case of Steve Jackson Games, Inc. v. United States Secret Service, Barlow started to open the eyes of the American public to the threats that could be posed to freedom of speech in the internet information society by writing a number of essays aimed at sharing the vision of cyberspace, using media as diverse as Mondo 2000, Communications of the ACM, The New York Times, and Time magazine. In 1993, he also contributed to the launch of Wired, a magazine dedicated to new technology.

Barlow thus threw himself into the battle for the defense of freedom on networks. At a moment when amending the Communications Act of 1934 was on the agenda of the Clinton administration, the EFF's offices moved from Kapor's Kapor Enterprises to Washington, DC, and a new team was formed. By 1994, Barlow's ideas had become more popular. Not only was he supported by a new generation of internet users, but his vision of the economy was being seconded by supporters. By declaring that the era of “the economy of ideas” had arrived, he made a major contribution to the constitution of the so-called New Economy by a number of unconventional economists and experts.

In January 1996, the Telecommunications Act was passed, and on February 8, 1996, President Bill Clinton signed it. Contrary to the EFF's expectations, it introduced a Communications Decency Act, aiming at regulating internet indecency and obscenity. Barlow immediately saw this as a restriction on free speech and a violation of the First Amendment of the US Constitution. He responded by writing “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace,” which was widely circulated on the internet. The EFF joined the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and seventeen other nonprofit organizations in a legal action against the Communications Decency Act. In June 1996, a panel of federal judges ruled in favor of the ACLU. A year later, on June 26, 1997, the judgment was upheld by the Supreme Court.

With the internet economy booming, Barlow's influence grew. During this period, he consulted for companies such as Apple and Microsoft and served on the advisory boards of different organizations. He traveled the world, especially the Southern Hemisphere, sharing his vision of an interconnected world freely sharing information. A Fellow at Harvard University's Berkman Center for Internet and Society since May 1998, he had been a source of inspiration for a new generation of political thinkers. Echoing his message, his disciple Lawrence Lessig wrote The Future of Ideas: The Fate of the Commons in a Connected World.

In addition to writing on these topics in various publications, in 2012, Barlow cofounded the nonprofit Freedom of the Press Foundation in a further effort to protect journalism that exposes governmental corruption and instances of breaking the law. Though he also continued to serve on the board of the EFF, in 2015, he barely survived a major heart attack, and he reportedly suffered from a variety of illnesses after that point. On February 7, 2018, it was announced that he had died at his home in San Francisco, California, at the age of seventy.

Personal Life

Barlow married Elaine Parker, an old school friend, in 1977. Together, they had three daughters. Another high school friend, Bob Weir, was the founder of the Grateful Dead, and Barlow wrote more than twenty-five songs for that group during the 1970s and the 1980s, occasionally traveling with the other band members and meeting other artists, including actor Marlon Brando.

Until 1988, Barlow lived with Elaine and their three daughters at the family ranch, in Cora, Wyoming; they separated in 1992. After he sold the ranch, Barlow moved to a two-bedroom house in Pinedale, only three doors from Elaine and his daughters. In 1992, he met Cynthia Horner, a twenty-seven-year-old psychiatrist, with whom he lived in New York. In April 1994, Horner died from an undiagnosed heart ailment, leaving Barlow deeply affected; he received thousands of condolences via email, and he would later confess that he had lost his greatest love.

Barlow eventually returned to Pinedale, where he retired. While enjoying life in the West, he continued to travel and to offer his expertise for those who could benefit from it. More than ever, he was a citizen of the world. He eventually settled in San Francisco when he became ill around early 2015.

Bibliography

Barnes, Barry. Everything I know About Business I Learned from the Grateful Dead: The Ten Most Innovative Lessons from a Long, Strange Trip. Business Plus, 2011. The business side of the Grateful Dead music band, with an afterword by Barlow.

Lessig, Lawrence. The Future of Ideas: The Fate of the Commons in a Connected World. Vintage, 2002. A popular essay that extends Barlow's views to the Internet regulation debate.

Morozov, Evgeny. The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom. PublicAffairs, 2011. An argumentative essay that counterbalances the ideas promoted by Barlow and the EFF.

Morrison, Aimée H. “An Impossible Future: John Perry Barlow's Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace.” New Media and Society, vol. 11, no. 1–2, 2009, pp. 53–71. A discussion of the widely circulated essay that Barlow wrote in reaction to the enactment of the Telecommunications Act.

Roberts, Sam. "John Perry Barlow, 70, Dies; Championed an Unfettered Internet." The New York Times, 8 Feb. 2018, www.nytimes.com/2018/02/08/obituaries/john-perry-barlow-internet-champion-dies.html. Accessed 2 Mar. 2018.

Sterling, Bruce. The Hacker Crackdown: Law and Disorder on the Electronic Frontier. Bantam, 1993. A tale of the nationwide raid operated by the U.S. Secret Service against hackers, with an insight on the creation of the EFF.