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John Perry Barlow I discovered the Internet, or came to find
out that it existed in 1985 - perhaps it was 1984 - I mean actually got online 1985. And
this was because I had been writing songs for a band in the United States called The
Grateful Dead and also because I was thinking about the future of community in America because
I came from a small, agricultural town that was a real community - I mean when people
even use the word now, they don't know what it means, I think, in many cases. This was
a place where everybody really literally counting on one another in a in the life and death
kind of way. And I thought you know, this kind of place is going to go away a because
it's so heavily dependent on family ranching and farming and I think that it offers kind
of spiritual nutrition that people need - so what's going to replace this? And I was looking
at the followers of the Grateful Dead who had a community like thing - I mean it did
actually resembled some of the aspects of life in my little town, the way they counted
on each other and the way they interacted and knew each other. And I wanted to study
them and see how they really operated in a more rigorously, anthropological way. But
the problem was that I was kind of a deal as far as they were concerned. They had a
somewhat misplaced, slightly religious view of who we and the band and the creative end
of things were. And so I come around them trying to find out what things were like with
them and immediately alter the thing that I was looking at and I had a friend who was
the founder the computer music lab at Stanford who said, “Well one way you could probably
study the deadheads without them noticing would be to watch them on the Internet.”
And I said, “What do you mean watch them on the Internet?” and she said, “Well
there are news groups on the Internet where they gather and they’re continuous - they're
sort of the village square that they use for continuous interaction - you were wondering
where that was, well that's where it is.” So I had a computer, which I was using mostly
because I was writing screenplays, and it was a much better form of white out (laughs).
If you rewrite a screenplay you have to take the entire damn thing all over again. And
also I was doing, I was running a cattle ranch, and I had you some of the ranch counting that
I was doing and I got myself a 300-baud modem, which had a suction cup that fit on a telephone
receiver and didn't have anything that could easily be called an owner’s manual, it just
had a bunch of Hays command terms that you had to figure out how to enter with your computer.
So it took me a while to get this thing to connect to the time net number that I'd been
given to connect to the Internet. She’d given me an Internet account at Stanford.
And I got online and you know I struggled my way to the Grateful Dead newsgroup, but
in the process I had this, I think genuinely religious experience, of feeling, sensing,
seeing that what I was looking at - thin as it was, just reduced to these little glowing
characters on a screen - was this infinitely expansive social space that every human being
on the planet would be in at some point. We would all be there together simultaneously
and it resonated with me for another reason because I'd been a big fan in college of the
works a French theologian named Pierre Teilhard de Chardin who had written actually in the
1930s, but I believe it wasn't published until the 1950s. He was an evolutionary theorist,
a paleontologist, a Jesuit priest and he'd written this notion that evolution had this
teleological thrust where things were getting more and more advanced and complex and sophisticated.
Which, you know, seems somewhat evident if you compare us to single-cell organisms. But
his idea was that very shortly the evolutionary process would take leave of the physical matter
and become a thing that was evolving out of thought itself and we would have the next
layer of evolution - something he called the Noosphere and that it would be made out of
thought and consciousness. And I had been very intrigued by that notion, it felt right
to me and when I saw the Internet I thought, “Here we are, this is the nervous system
the collective organism with mind - already under way in its development. I decided that
almost immediately that this was something that I wanted to facilitate in any way that
could be open to me because it just seemed like the great work that humanity was about
to embark on, or already had embarked on. At that point I don't suppose there were 200,000
people in the world with an email address, but it already been going on for awhile, I
mean the Internet been in existence since 1969 and this was 1985 so you know it wasn't
like a brand new thing, but I would say it was new enough so that I was the only cattle
rancher on it. I was coming from a completely different angle, which enabled me to perceive
things about it that I think were a little harder for some other folks that were using
at that point to see. Since a lot of them were still just trying to get a packet to
go from Point A to Point B and trying to figure out why it wouldn't a lot of the time and
dealing with the technical issues and not fully perceiving just how huge this was. I
mean I felt then and I continue to feel and I’ve taken a certain measure of crap for
saying that this is the most important technological event in the history of humanity since the
capture of fire. And you could really say that it's been going on for longer than people
think it has. I would mark the beginning of this - whatever we call this the Internet
- to be that point - and I think it was 1837 when Samuel FB Morse typed out, “What hath
God wrought” in Washington, D.C., and someone read it simultaneously in Baltimore. As soon
as you could communicate instantaneously at a distance like that, then everything changed,
and it changes more and more all the time. But that was what got me interested in it
to begin with. For a long time I didn't know what it was that I was going to able to do
that would be useful outside of learning everything I possibly could about it - how it worked
and what was going on in it and that kind of thing. But I did depart the cattle business
in 1988 and was looking around for what I wanted to do next and I thought that the most
important thing I could do would be to start thinking and writing about the Internet, in
terms of the social and political and economic and philosophical, even religious aspects
of what this might do in the world, because I could easily imagine it changing everything.
I could easily imagine it causing there to be a fundamental renegotiation of all the
existing power relationships on the planet in a relatively short time. And nobody seemed
to be writing or talking about that, and so even though I didn't have any credentials
to speak of, I thought, “Well I can probably know as much about this as the next guy pretty
quickly.” And I got to know the people who had been working on it. Spent a lot of time
around them, really, really appreciating how blessed we had been with the quality of those
people who actually were very aware in many cases of what it was they were doing. And
maybe they didn't write about it necessarily, but they were certainly thinking about it.
And then in late 1989, by that time I'd I gotten on to something called The Well, which
wasn't connected to the Internet - it was a bulletin board that had been started by
Stewart Brand and Kevin Kelly. Stewart Brand had done the Whole Earth Catalogue and Whole
Earth Review magazine and Kevin Kelly eventually became the editor of Wired. But they'd put
together a computer bulletin board that was really the digital salon of its time. There
were a lot of extremely articulate, thoughtful literary people on The Well. There was a continuous
set of discussions going on there that was very fruitful to be part of. And Harper’s
magazine - to this day I don't know what inspired those guys to do this - but there were a couple
of the editors at Harper's, one of them named Paul Tough and the other one named Jack Hitt,
and completely misnamed people - not at all violent. But they had decided they wanted
to do a Harper's forum on a bunch of items that were very pertinent, particularly at
the moment about: what is forbidden knowledge, what is a secret, what is hacking, when is
it wrong, how do we define barriers for information and digital environments, you know, a whole
bunch of these kinds of issues. And they asked me and several other people to be a part of
this forum on The Well. And there were these kids - they were phone phreaks, early phone
system hackers, what they really were doing was breaking into the telephone system and
trying to create their own Internet because they didn't have access to the real thing.
They were all like 14 years old and they had fearsome names like Phiber Optik and Acid
Phreak and Scorpion and an organization called the Legion of Doom. And you know they spent
enough time strutting around like they were pretty dangerous. And they were irritating
- especially to an old hippie. At one point I made some slightly insulting remark about
how if somebody took away their modems and gave them skateboards it wouldn’t make a
damn bit of difference. And this being true it really irritated them, so they downloaded
my entire credit record into the conference and said they could change it at will if they
felt like it - which they couldn't - they were bragging but that the fact remained that
it scared me because, you know, if you don’t have any credit in America you might as well
be broke. So I said, “Look, I think we've just exceeded the bandwidth of this medium.
I would appreciate it if you'd give me a call and I won't insult your intelligence by giving
you my phone number, which was listed anyway, but they didn't know that - and immediately
I get this phone call from like six different kids on different phone booths and in New
York. They all parachuted in through the phone system, and their voices haven't even changed
yet - I mean they're just kids and I’m thinking, “Well, I know where these kids are at, I
mean they’re like I was when I was that age. They just want to violate the forbidden
and the forbidden they really want to violate, you know, is the usual one that teenage boys
really want to violate but they haven't come up with access to that yet so they’re doing
stuff to the phone system. So I got to know them pretty well. I just had an affinity for
them. The next thing I know I was kind of like a Scoutmaster to the Legion of Doom.
And then one day, one of them comes home and finds that his 12-year-old sister has been
held at gunpoint for quite a while by several large men from the Secret Service. Well, they
remove every single electronic item from his house - like his clock radio and his Metallica
tapes – they’re taking it all. And then I find that several others of them have had
roughly the same experience. And I'm thinking well, maybe these kids are much worse than
I thought. I mean, this sounds like they must be doing something pretty that bad they would
be getting such acute government action all over them. And it was about that time I got
a phone call from Special Agent Richard Baxter from the Rock Springs, Wyoming, field office
of the FBI - who was a fellow that I knew because he was investigating livestock theft
and I did have some cattle stolen at one point. He was pretty good on this stuff. And he was
nervous as a cat in a room full of rocking chairs - he was just anxious. He said he wanted
to come up and talk to me but he couldn't tell me what it was about on the phone, you
know. God, I'm writing songs for the Grateful Dead. I don't want to have a visit from the
FBI where he won't tell me what it's about – right? It just makes you uneasy. So he
comes and he’s very nervous and he has a terrible time explaining to me what it is
that he's investigating - because he doesn't understand it very well himself. But gradually
I understand that somebody has taken some of the source code from the ROM chip on the
Macintosh - all that source code that dealt with the early version of QuickTime - and
has sent bits of it out on floppy disks to people in a protest against Apple's closed
architecture, and has threatened to release the entire body the source code and Apple
has freaked out and has told the FBI that somebody's about to go out there giving away
the precious Macintosh recipe and in no time at all they’ll be making them in Taiwan
and that'll be the end - all of which is nonsense. But he's convinced that there's a major economic
crime about to take place being perpetrated by something that he keeps calling the New
Prosthesis League - the actual name was the New Prometheus League - that was just part
of what he had wrong, he had everything wrong. And it was really just a disturbing experience.
You never like to see really insecure, highly armed people in authority wandering around
in places they don't understand because trouble will come. And I felt that what I was seeing
was the same thing that my friends from the Legion of Doom had been seeing. And I'd also
in the meantime, I'd heard about some other stuff like this going on - the role-playing-game
company in Austin, Texas, that had the Secret Service come in and just take everything in
their office because they were doing a game called Cypherpunk, that the Secret Service
decided was a handbook for computer crime.
And there was a kid in Indiana – or Illinois I guess it was - who was publishing an online
magazine called Phrack where he published stolen documents from the phone company about
the 911 system. I mean you could buy this document for 12 bucks, but this just was sort
of a trophy that he put up as being something he hacked out of system and he was being charged
with the theft of $200,000 in property. And so it was like that. I wrote something about
this - which I put on The Well called “Crime and Puzzlement” about the whole experience.
Two days later I got a phone call from Mitch Kapor, who had created Lotus 1-2-3. At that
time it was the dominant spreadsheet software and Lotus as a company was kind of like Microsoft.
For microcomputers it was a very big deal, and he was flying his private jet over the
United States and he had also had a visit from the FBI that he hadn’t told anybody
about. And he'd read my piece and so suddenly had a support network and he wanted to just
basically drop out of the sky and come talk to me about this - which he did. We spent
the afternoon I told him everything I knew about Steve Jackson Games, the Legion of Doom,
et cetera, and we decided that what we would do was get some civil liberties firm involved
since he could afford that, and reestablish the Constitution in what I had started calling
“cyberspace” in that initial piece. Up to that point it didn't have a name, I just
borrowed Bill Gibson’s name for it and started referring to it as that. I think that's the
first time anybody started talking about this as that. So we brought suit in several cases,
we started to get some publicity and there were suddenly a lot of people that wanted
to get involved. Steve Wozniak came forward and gave us $100,000. John Gilmore - who is
still very much an integral part of EFF came forward. He sent me an email (laughs) - I
didn't know him very well - he sent me an email and said, “I don't have the kind of
money that Mitch has, but will $100,000 help?” That was all it said. I said yes (laughs).
We hadn't been at this very long before we started to realize that this was not just
going to be a simple matter of clarifying the application of the First Amendment to
bits or the Fourth Amendment to computer files. And in fact at one point after we'd made a
little publicity, I got an email from some kid who had crawled across the border into
Finland from what was still the Soviet Union in order to send me an email saying, “Well
that's all great but what about us? We don't even have a Constitution. We don't even have
a First Amendment or Fourth Amendment.” And I realized that - it was another one of
those come to Jesus moments - where I realized that in cyberspace nobody had a First Amendment
really - and never would - because the thing is, all rights are derived naturally from
the ability to deny rights. All rights are the flip side of coercive. And if you've got
an environment where it's very difficult to impose yourself as human beings - which it
is there - I mean for all their efforts to make it so, it's very difficult to convey
the opposite have that imposition as well. So we knew that what we could do for a while
was to use the law especially in places like the United States where there was one that
we could apply, but ultimately, the real thing was going to have to be influencing the architecture
of the Internet as it grew so that it went on having those interesting characteristics
of leaderless-ness and practical anarchy that it had since it was born. And that would convey
to some extent a lot of those rights. And we also were very aware that the Internet
was probably going to grow into something that would be like the most sophisticated
tool for surveillance that human beings had ever derived - we're now seeing just how true
that is. But we had this faith that if the architecture were preserved in its open state,
that it was conceivable to us that the Internet would eventually be something where anybody,
anywhere could say whatever they wanted and nobody would be in a position to stop them.
And that anybody anywhere could learn as much as could then be known about anything that
people studied and that - from the standpoint of Teilhard de Chardin - a global organism
of mind would be a pretty significant human development.
So that's what EFF has done, what I've done in the 20-some odd years since then is to
be continuously at work on keeping choke points from forming around the Internet and keeping
legal controls from being imposed, minding their architecture a lot. I mean I spent a
huge amount of time. I realized in about 1993 that the most likely way in which the powers
that had been would be able to control the information on the Internet was going to be
through intellectual property law, that the claim that one could own speech would be the
means by which people would be able to stop its flow - because they would say, “No that's
my speech, that can’t flow,” or expression whatever sort it might be. So I wrote a piece
called, “The Economy of Ideas” for Wired in ’93 and that was, I will modestly say,
that was one of the most important things anybody had said at that point about the Internet
because nobody was thinking about it in those terms. Nobody realized yet that if you had
an environment where you could reproduce anything that a human being could create with his mind
infinitely at zero cost and distribute it infinitely at zero cost the whole notion of
copyright was just out the window. And, besides, copyright existed in the first place to protect
this manufacturing process that had to be there in order to spread ideas since you didn't
have another way to do it besides embedding them in a physical object which was manufactured,
and that cost money - you had to ship the thing around - and that cost money, and so
you needed something to protect the people that were making those objects. But, suddenly
you didn’t, and the people who'd been making those objects thought what they were really
selling was the wine and not the bottles. They were really in the bottling business
- they didn’t know anything about the wine business. And they were going to get very
aggressive about trying to maintain their business model as it became completely irrelevant
- which it has. And so that's been a big part of what we've done. At the time that I wrote
that, I think I might have been one of four people on planet Earth that thought this was
a problem, now I would say I've got entire armies of people who agree with me on this.
At a certain point, I popped off and wrote a document called, “The Declaration of the
Independence of Cyberspace,” which I really did not intend to become some canonical document.
I’d been to the World Economic Forum and I'd seen all this sort of strutting around
in the twilight of the nation-state, and the United States government had just signed into
law something called the Communications Decency Act, which made it a felony to say “***”
online, and, given the fact that I’d heard many of those words that were now felonious
to speak in digital media spoken in the Senate dining room, I knew this wasn't going to go
very well. And so I dashed this thing off in the middle of a party, really, and sent
it out to my friends and it became… I think you can probably find it on several hundred
thousand websites and people now pay more attention - and it goes through periods of
being laughed at and then taken seriously. There was a time where people really thought,
“Well, governments really are going to…they're going to win this thing, they're going to
really take over.” But I still have no strong reason to believe that sovereignty - in sense
that the nation-state thinks of it - is going to ever be successfully imposed on cyberspace.
And in fact, I would say that more people are waking up to the fact that the nation-state
doesn't have terribly good reason to go on existing; the main thing it does is make war.
Well, I think there were quite a number of moments. There was the time that EFF was trying
to deal with the fact that they were trying to basically - well they had succeeded, essentially
- in outlawing strong cryptography by making cryptographic algorithms the equivalent of
machine guns as far as the international trade in arms was concerned. So you couldn't export
a strong crypto, a piece of strong crypto software or hardware that contains strong
crypto - which essentially meant there was no business for the people that would actually
be creating such stuff. And we had this really incredibly clever insight that an encryption
algorithm was a form of speech, and what they were doing was imposing prior restraint on
speech and that was unconstitutional, they couldn't do that and we managed to get something
called “the Bernstein decision.” That stopped the control of strong crypto, which
I think is extremely important, because if it hadn't been for that you wouldn't have
any business going on on the Net. It'd be impossible to do all the economic stuff that
is routinely done if you couldn't have encrypted things - as the NSA and the FBI wanted it
to be, since they were much more worried about controlling terrorism and child ***
than they were about creating the future – and that’s always the case. I would say… I
mean there’s been some moments lately, well setting up an organization which recently
I did with Daniel Ellsberg, John Cusack and several others to see to the funding of WikiLeaks
and to working out ways of keeping Mr. Snowden out of harm's way - and also encouraging him
and others like him to come forward, setting this thing up as being something that would
be protected for people like that so when he decided to come forward, he contacted two
people from this organization that is only seven to eight months old – the Freedom
of the Press Foundation, and got Glenn Greenwald to come in and take his statement. So that’s
the more recent things that tie into the first thing. Gosh, what else… Dave Farber - who
you’re probably also talking to - and I were instrumental in getting China on the
Internet, which was kind of a big moment. The Chinese Academy of Sciences had us come
to Beijing in ’93 to talk about the Internet, along with Mitch Kapor. We thought that was
interesting, I mean we didn't know that they knew anything about it, really, but there
were five major research universities in China that were using TCP/IP as their internetworking
protocol. So we talked about how it was here and we gave kind of an academic talk. We didn't
feel like China was likely to be very interested in getting connected to it. There was a dinner
afterwards where I was seated with this extraordinary woman named Madame Qiheng Hu. She was the
vice chair of the Academy of Sciences and the person who was in charge of the Chinese
computer networks and she is still the Chinese representative to the Internet Society to
this day. We were having all these toasts, and it was getting harder and harder to think,
and I said, “Before we have another toast Madam Hu, I want to talk to you about the
Internet.” And she said, “That's good, that's why you're here.” And I said, “Well,
I’ll just cut to the chase. I want China to be connected to the Internet.” And she
said, “That's good, that's why you're here.” And I said, “China wants to be connected
to the Internet?” She said, “Course we do.” And I said, “Why aren't you then?”
And she said, “Because your Department of Energy has the idea that if we get connected
to the Internet we’ll steal your nuclear secrets.” And I said, “Well I would’ve
thought 10,000 grad students could do a perfectly fine job with that.” And she said, “Of
course they could, besides, you don't have that many secrets. You know, nuclear weapons
are mostly about having the industrial capacity to make that much weapons-grade uranium.”
And I said, “All right, surely there are some people in your government,” - this
was not that long after Tiananmen Square - I said, “Surely there are some people in your
government that would be a little uncomfortable about having every student in China have a
global printing press.” And she said, “Of course there are, but they wouldn't know that
that was what this is, and I know I've always felt it's better to apologize than ask permission.”
So we went back and talked to the National Science Foundation and the Department of Energy
and backed them down and got China connected.
I would say that it is as it almost always is, with a huge thunderhead taking up half
the sky on one side and a glorious blue sky on the other and difficult to figure out which
direction the wind’s moving. But that’s the interesting thing about the Internet,
and I've been fighting these battles all along, between the powers of the past and the powers
of the future, and this really is the entire industrial period - and you can even say the
entire period of monotheism itself - up against the future. But so far it's been what I would
call a stalemate. You’ve got more and more and more and more people involved, bigger
and bigger forces engaged, but so far I'd say we've been beaten pretty much to a draw,
which will suffice. Eventually I would say that we can take some heart in the idea that
most of the people who feel the way I do about this are young, and most of the people who
feel the way that they do about this are old. And someday you guys will be alive when they're
dead. And then I think the future can truly get under way.
Well haven't changed all that much. I mean, my greatest hope - and the thing I've been
working for most of my life now - is that the Internet will realize itself as being
something that makes it possible for anybody to know anything that they’re capable of
knowing, which I think is a wonderful thought. Or that it will make it possible for anybody
that has something important that other people to hear - to say it without any fear of being
shut up or coerced or that sort of thing. My fear is probably, you know, deeply connected
with all the things that I hope for - in the sense that human beings are flawed creatures
and a lot of what we want to say is really kind of awful, and we have economic ambitions
that are finding all kinds of ugly new ways to manifest themselves, and I think that's
a pity, and it certainly becomes possible to see practically everything in people's
lives. You know, when you’re reeling out this digital slime trail all the time now
that can be rolled up, you know, turned into you. And there's almost no help for that,
ultimately. I don't mind that because I come from a small town where everybody knew everything
about me anyway. But what has to happen in order for this to be a safe state is that
the institutions have to become as transparent as the individuals. We can’t go on having
greater and greater secrecy in our institutions and less and less privacy as people. And so
I think that’s the biggest question of the moment right now. And if we don't win that
one, I can imagine a very grim future. I think we will, I mean, we're down to - you look
at what's going on with Bradley Manning and Julian Assange, Edward Snowden - I mean that's
the tip of the iceberg. There’s going to be a lot more of that because you know the
governments and the great powers of the industrial period have done a lot of crummy stuff that
is, at minimum, embarrassing. They don't want people to know about this, and suddenly it’s
going to be very difficult to keep people from knowing about this unless they just go
out and torture to death everybody who does something about it. So it’s going to be
pretty rough on the people that are trying to change it for a while.
What needs to happen now is that everybody who knows anything that ought to be known
by the rest of humanity should reveal it - as hard as that will be. What needs to happen
now is everybody should realize that we have - as a human right - the right to know about
everything that is humanly applicable in any larger sense about government, about science,
about anything. That this is something that has never been promulgated before because
it was never before possible but it is now possible. And it's a right that we need to
develop and assert. That's the most important thing for us to be doing, I think.
Well, I fully expect that it’s going to go on being basically the same contest for
quite a while. It's been the same contest as long as I've been engaged in it and it
will go on being a contest. Maybe that's just the human contest - the control freaks versus
the anarchists. Or the Apollonians versus the Dionysians. It’s the people who love
liberty versus the people who fear it. It may just be actually love versus fear in the
final analysis. So there will always be that sort of thing. It's a very powerful thing,
the Internet. It’s certainly capable of doing a lot of harm and good at the same time.
I like to say that I've been the dealing with the Internet now long enough so that it’s
actually realized all my dreams, and with them, my worst nightmares.