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
John Perry Barlow quotes about
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.
I ... believe that angels, or something like them, sometimes live among us, hidden within our fellow human beings.
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.
But groundless hope, like unconditional love, is the only kind worth having.
Out of the ashes of the music business, comes the rebirth of the musician business.
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.
If someone like Karl Rove had wanted to neutralize the most creative, intelligent, and passionate members of his opposition, he'd have a hard time coming up with a better tool than Burning Man. Exile them to the wilderness, give them a culture in which alpha status requires months of focus and resource-consumptive preparation, provide them with metric tons of psychotropic confusicants, and then... ignore them. It's a pretty safe bet that they won't be out registering voters, or doing anything that might actually threaten electoral change, when they have an art car to build.
Relying on the government to protect your privacy is like asking a peeping tom to install your window blinds.
If all ideas have to be bought, then you have an intellectually regressive system that will assure you have a highly knowledgeable elite and an ignorant mass.
The entertainment industry is as it always has been. It's a rough bunch of people and a rough industry.
The Internet is the most liberating tool for humanity ever invented, and also the best for surveillance. It's not one or the other. It's both.