John Perry Barlow
John Perry Barlow
John Perry Barlowis an American poet and essayist, a retired Wyoming cattle rancher, and a cyberlibertarian political activist who has been associated with both the Democratic and Republican parties. He is also a former lyricist for the Grateful Dead and a founding member of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Freedom of the Press Foundation. As of 2016, he is a Fellow Emeritus at Harvard University's Berkman Center for Internet and Society, where he has maintained an affiliation since 1998. He...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionWriter
Date of Birth3 October 1947
CountryUnited States of America
New solutions win by virtue of adoption, and they don't get adopted if they're bad solutions.
Notions of property, value, ownership, and the nature of wealth itself are changing more fundamentally than at any time since the Sumerians first poked cuneiform into wet clay and called it stored grain ... few people are aware of the enormity of this shift and fewer of them are lawyers or public officials.
I don't know that I believe in the supernatural, but I do believe in miracles, and our time together was filled with the events of magical unlikelihood.
The real issue is control. The Internet is too widespread to be easily dominated by any single government. By creating a seamless global economic zone, anti-sovereign and unregulatable, the Internet calls into question the very idea of a nation-state.
In Cyberspace, the First Amendment is a local ordinance.
Royalties are not how most writers or musicians make their living. Musicians by and large make a living with a relationship with an audience that is economically harnessed through performance and ticket sales.
I've begun to wonder if we wouldn't also regard spelunkers as desperate criminals if AT&T owned all the caves.
I'm a member of that half of the human race which is inclined to divide the human race into two kinds of people. My dividing line runs between the people who crave certainty and the people who trust chance.
Art is a service, not a product. Created beauty is a relationship, and a relationship with the Holy at that. Reducing such work to 'content' is like praying in swear words. End of Sermon. Back to business.
Incompetence is a double-edged banana.
Humanity seems bent on creating a world economy primarily based on goods that take no material form. In doing so, we may be eliminating any predictable connection between creators and a fair reward for the utility others may find in their works.
God's jokes are the soul's curriculum.
The more you've got, the shorter it feels.
Hope does not always require probability.