EFFecting Digital Freedom

by Jason Kelley

Remembering John Perry Barlow

John Perry Barlow's (1947-2018) vision, writing, and hopefulness helped set the tone for the Internet that we have today.

A lot of people in the late-1980s, including those in power in the government and in corporations, saw "cyberspace" as simply a toy or hobby.  Barlow, then a rancher and sometime lyricist for the Grateful Dead, realized in contrast that it offered something much greater.

Connecting to online communities like The WELL from his ranch in Wyoming, he saw the Internet as a place where physical distance and even physical bodies no longer mattered, and recognized that the technology could create a kind of connection that humans had been craving.

He saw communities developing around these "frontier villages," and he also saw that the early adopters of the Internet - a group made up mostly of engineers, coders, and people hacking their way around Cyberspace - needed allies in the civil liberties world.

As governments and corporations began to take the Internet more seriously, they also began to clamp down on what it could be used to do and chill the ways it might be used in the future.  Early raids on BBS users by the Secret Service and the FBI, and shutdowns of online newsletters like Phrack, made it clear to Barlow that the Internet's promise could be crushed if it had no defenders.  In his words, "It could be a fundamental place of freedom, where voices long silenced could find an audience," or a place where government "limited free speech, conducted improper seizure of equipment and data, used undue force, and generally conducted itself in a fashion which is arbitrary, oppressive, and unconstitutional."

Hackers were under scrutiny at the moment, but the Internet, in Barlow's mind, could offer so much to humanity that the promise, and the danger, applied to far more than just those at the fringes.  He also understood that "hacking" wasn't something to be feared, but something intrinsic to human nature: "Far more than just opposable thumbs, upright posture, or excess cranial capacity, human beings are set apart from all other species by an itch, a hard-wired dissatisfaction.  Computer hacking is just the latest in a series of quests that started with fire hacking.  Hacking is also a collective enterprise.  It brings to our joint endeavors the simultaneity that other collective organisms... take for granted.  This is important, because combined with our itch to probe is a need to connect."

As soon as Barlow understood the threat posed by these shutdowns and raids, he got to work.

As he put it, during a lengthy 1990 interview with 2600's radio program Off The Hook (then called The Fifth Corner), "Whenever you've got an agency of the government that's out of control, the best thing you can do is invoke another part of the government against it.  And in this case, fortunately, you've got the judiciary."

He co-founded the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) with Mitch Kapor that year to defend the Internet from and explain it to the vast majority who didn't understand it, and to talk about it as a place of freedom so we might have a hope of building it that way.  In his most well-known essay, the "A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace," he dreamt of a stateless frontier where "All may enter without privilege or prejudice accorded by race, economic power, military force, or station of birth" and "Where anyone, anywhere may express his or her beliefs, no matter how singular, without fear of being coerced into silence or conformity."

We may not have the web Barlow wanted, but much of the freedom we do have there is thanks in no small part to his philosophy and effort throughout the Internet's early days.

He helped carve out a space for people to fulfill that dream, and inspired them to do so.  It's difficult to overstate the significance of those battles: Freeing encryption from government control and establishing that the Internet was a place of free speech - and that code itself was protected by the First Amendment - were fundamental to the Internet's growth and to protecting its users, especially the curious tinkerers and hackers on the digital frontier.

Security researchers, programmers, and developers exploring cutting-edge technology would likely not be protected in their work without the precedents and ideas Barlow helped set in motion.  He saw that as technology changed; education, legal defense, and providing policy advice to people considering computer crime legislation would be necessary, and it continues to be a large part of EFF's work.

Of course, it's no longer only the civil liberties of the early adopters that must be protected.

Barlow saw that his high hopes might not come to pass, but he made a conscious decision to focus on the Internet's potential, and to consistently remind us that we were in control, writing: "I knew it's also true that a good way to invent the future is to predict it.  So I predicted Utopia, hoping to give Liberty a running start before the laws of Moore and Metcalfe delivered up what Ed Snowden now correctly calls 'turn-key totalitarianism.'"

His goal was to ensure that a humane, supportive, connected Internet could get that running start.

His wisdom will be instrumental in keeping up the fight for decades to come, and he will always be an integral part of EFF.

He helped set the tone for the Internet, and inspires everyone who fights for a better one today.

Read our collection of Barlow's writings at: www.eff.org/john-perry-barlow