People call John Perry Barlow a cyber cowboy, but that isn’t the half of it.
He is, or has been, a hard-drinking, motorcycle riding, jack mormon, an environmentalist, a draft dodging hippy, and a registered Republican. He wrote songs for the Grateful Dead, spent a year in India, and ran his family’s Wyoming cattle ranch for 17-years.
What the world knows Barlow best for, though, is the laissez faire Electronic Frontier Foundation he cofounded and his 1996 “Declaration of Independence (from the Realm of Cyberspace)” – a libertarian manifesto that’s made him the digital Thomas Paine.
“Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel,” he begins, “I come to you from Cyberspace, the new home of the 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.”
Netizens Unite! John Perry Barlow is on this hour.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)
Guests:
John Perry Barlow