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
Musicians by and large make a living with a relationship with an audience that is economically harnessed through performance and ticket sales.
The government targets 'Anonymous' for the same reason it targets al-Qaida - because they're the enemy.
There are a lot of kids out there copying and distributing movies - not because they care about seeing the movies or sharing them with their friends, but because they want to stick it to the movie business.
Most scientific revelations happened after the pursuit of knowledge quit being secret and hermetic.
It's widely assumed that you can't compete with free, and that seems like a reasonable thing to think. But this has not been my experience.
I think that humor is part of what saves us from despair.
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.
Google, Amazon, Apple. Any number of cloud providers and computer service providers who can increasingly limit your access to your own information, control all your processing, take away your data if they want to, and observe everything you do; in a way, that does give them some leverage over your own life.
The Internet amplifies power in all respects. It can grossly exaggerate the power of the individual.
The 'Total Information Awareness' project is truly diabolical - mostly because of the legal changes which have made it possible in the first place. As a consequence of the Patriot Act, government now has access to all sorts of private and commercial databases that were previously off limits.
Any powerful technology has sauce for the goose and the gander... It's just an extension of humanity.
The Internet may well disempower the nation state, but at the same time, it also strengthens certain specific state functions - like surveillance. As a political entity, it doesn't empower the nation sate. It creates the availability of much more data than the digestive system of the nation state could possibly assimilate.
It didn't matter what we did or where we did it as long as we were together. We knew we'd found what most people either pursue in years of futile search or dismiss as a fantasy at the outset: the missing half of ourselves. The real thing.
They seem to have forgotten that, and are back saying the only purpose of P2P networks is for illegal trading of owned goods. We claim part of the reason for P2P is for legal trading of what ought to be in public domain. And what is in public domain in many cases.