John Perry Barlow is a recognized commentator on computer security, virtual reality, digitized electronic property, and the social and legal conditions arising in the global network of connected digital devices. A co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an organization that promotes freedom of expression in digital media, our interview subject is also a lyricist for the Grateful Dead, and a retired Wyoming cattle rancher.
Educom Review: You had a long relationship with the Grateful Dead, and even wrote lyrics for the group. What would you say about the relevance of that experience to your interest in information technology?
Barlow: It's relevant in a couple of ways. First of all, the reason I became involved in this field is that I was thinking about community and the future of community, and was concerned about its present condition. And I was looking for other ways of doing it that might have a future, since my sense of it was based entirely on small towns, small agricultural towns like my home that I didn't feel had a very promising future. So I was looking at the Deadheads as a form of community that was not economically focused nor geographically locused. And I wondered how they do this without having some of the fundamental aspects of continuity that I think are part of community. Then somebody told me that one of the areas of community they had was online relationships, which was a concept that I didn't understand at the time. But this fellow got me into that environment and, lo, there they were engaged in a lot of activities that I think of as being those of a small town - social, commercial, and, to some extent, random interaction that takes place on the courthouse steps or in the post office or wherever. That was back in about '86, and so that had something to do with my getting into the environment to begin with; and then also a lot of the notions I have about how we get paid for the work we do with our minds, and what the importance of copyright is, and those kinds of issues, came directly as a result of my experience with the success that the Grateful Dead experienced by being extremely liberal with our intellectual property. We allowed Deadheads to tape our concerts. And that, in some respects, was the secret of our success. Rather than having our success diminished by it, it was contributory to it.
E.R.: How would you summarize that idea?
Barlow: What I would say is that in a purely information economy, instead of value being based upon scarcity, it's based on familiarity. And we spread our familiarity - rather, I should say, it spread itself - by the self-reproductive nature of those tapes.
E.R.: A devil's advocate might ask: Does that place a higher premium on performance and celebrity, and less on intellectual property?
Barlow: Well, I think that celebrity has always been a factor in the value of intellectual goods. If you are a well-known writer, you are generally going to sell a lot better than if you are unknown. That goes for musicians or whatever. But I think if you broaden your sense of performance to include those works that have not yet been created and include execution rather than ownership, then yeah, I think so. What we are talking about is an economy in which you are paid for an idea you haven't yet had, not ones you have had. And that's the way everybody works, and I'm willing to live with that.
E.R.: What if some people took your Web site and went through it and took out the works of John Perry Barlow and published them and didn't give you any money for them - would you care?
Barlow: Well, you mean published them under their own name?
E.R.: No, published them under your name but didn't give you any money.
Barlow: Well, if they published them on paper, they would be violating the copyright law.
E.R.: Yes, they certainly would.
Barlow: And as long as we are talking about material copies, I think the law is fine. It's immaterial copies that I think are the issue.
E.R.: If they put them on their Web site? Would you object to that?
Barlow: If they are making commercial use. I mean, the Grateful Dead didn't allow commercial use of its material, but it had a very liberal notion toward fair use. I think, in general, that the notion of fair use should be greatly expanded - rather than eliminated, which is what many of the principal parties that are involved in trying to regulate copyright at the moment are proposing legislatively. They are proposing that any time a computer writes some piece of copyrighted material into memory, that that is making a licensable copy and that the operator of that system should pay a fee, which is ludicrous. Now if you are out there publishing commercial copies in physical form, then I think you need to be observing all the laws as they exist.
E.R.: What about a commercial Web site, let's say an AOL or some site that has subscriber fees, and the managers took John Perry Barlow's content and appropriated it, gave you credit, put it up and charged people to view it, along with other things they offered?
Barlow: I don't think I'd have a problem with that.
E.R.: You wouldn't?
Barlow: No.
E.R.: Let's talk a little bit about your educational background. You grew up in a small community and went to a one-room schoolhouse in Wyoming. Was that a big influence on you?
Barlow: Certainly.
E.R.: In what ways?
Barlow: Well, among other things it made me think differently about what education is. For me education is intensely experiential. It isn't "information" - in the sense that the word has for most people who are getting a public education. I learned in Wyoming that education was about living there in it and not having it descend on me in a one-way flow from the front of the classroom. It was highly interactive. All of the kids in that school were different ages and we were teaching each other as much as we were learning from the teacher. And that, actually, I think is the model of the future if you take a look at how people learn to use computers. Almost none of them learn in any kind of academic setting. They learn from one another and they learn from the computer itself.
E.R.: How old were the kids, from what to what?
Barlow: There were at most seven of us and they were all of different ages, ranging from five to thirteen.
E.R.: There were only seven of you? You really were in an isolated community!
Barlow: Oh, yes.
E.R.: This was not alternative schooling?
Barlow: No, no. This was a public school. This was the only schooling there was. The area that I grew up in is - that county is bigger than The Netherlands and has about 4,000 people in it. So it was very isolated and still is.
E.R.: And you go back there?
Barlow: I live there.
E.R.: You went to Wesleyan in Connecticut and studied comparative religion. Talk about that experience in relation to your current interests.
Barlow: I think that what I was looking for in comparative religion was some additional understanding about the nature of both man and whatever you want to call that all-encompassing thing that lies within and above and around man, or humanity I should say. And that has been the quest of my life and it has manifested itself in a lot of different, apparently disparate quests, including the one I'm on now, which is doing whatever I can to see that humanity is connected. Part of what I encountered while I was studying comparative religion was Teilhard de Chardin, the French anthropologist and theologian, who probably more than any other single writer set me on my current course by talking about the evolutionary struggle to create unitary consciousness in humanity.
E.R.: You consider Teilhard a model for the Web?
Barlow: I think what the Internet is about is wiring together precisely what Teilhard was talking about, the collective organization of mind.
E.R.: Let's go from humanity to commerce. Has the commercialization of the Web troubled you at all?
Barlow: Well, I think everything human beings do is commerce, whether you attach money to it or not. I think that everything that life does iscommerc e. It doesn't make any difference whether you are negotiating photons or dollars, all ecology is commercial exchange. And I would be dismayed if explicit commerce had never entered the picture on the Web, because that would mean that it was sidelined as a secondary activity and not central to human concerns. I think humans have a will to survive that expresses itself these days in commercial ambition.
E.R.: Speaking of dismay, is there anything that you are dismayed about regarding the Web?
Barlow: Well, I'm dismayed at all the dismay, I suppose - the number of otherwise sensible people who seem to think that this is like television, only worse. And personally I think it's the antidote to television. The principal thing that drives me at the moment is trying to do something that will rid us of the hideous social infection of TV in suburbia.
E.R.: When you say the Net is not like television, you are saying - ?
Barlow: I'm saying it's conversational, not informational. I'm saying the Net is a two-way exchange; it's not a one-way exchange. And I'm saying it's something that survives not on selling the attention of the audience on the advertisers, but in generating attention in the way that human beings more naturally generate attention - through interaction with one another.
E.R.: Then aren't you worried that the Net is in fact becoming more like television all the time?
Barlow: I don't see much evidence of it. To some extent the Web is, but I frankly don't think the Web is the most important part of the Internet. The most important thing that goes on in the Internet is electronic mail. And that is a conversational dialogue. The Web is more like publishing. But I don't know anybody who just hangs around and surfs the Web.
E.R.: And you don't think that will be different five or ten years from now?
Barlow: No. On the contrary. I think that the large commercial enterprises that are trying to turn the Web into business as usual are all losing money hand over fist. And the people who are making money on the Web are the ones that are selling tools and "context." "Content" is not sellable - it is not a particularly commercial item. What sells on the Web is context. And where most of the money is being made is in creating ways of creating context.
E.R.: You are one of the co-founders with Mitch Kapor of the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
Barlow: Yes. Everybody wants to call it the Electronic Freedom Foundation and I'm starting to think maybe we should have. The Electronic Frontier Foundation exists and has been there for a good while now to try to assure that the initial architecture of cyberspace would be free and open - because we knew and know that what we're creating is the foundation for the foreseeable future of human discourse. And if we could assure that the opening phases of this environment were completely free, then it would remain free and it would remain a place where anybody anywhere could say whatever they thought without fear of censure. And I think that's a very important undertaking, because there's never been a place like that before in the history of humanity. There has never been a medium in which everybody could speak their piece and everybody else who was interested could listen. I can't think of any better ambition really than to aspire to be the kind of ancestor that has set free all of his descendants. And that's what we are about.
E.R.: Free expression and privacy?
Barlow: Well, freedom to be private if you like. Frankly, I pray for a society where people feel no interest in being private, because they feel sufficiently confident of the tolerance and acceptance of the rest of society that they have nothing to hide.
E.R.: Well, what about privacy in the sense of being let alone?
Barlow: Well, I think there's a difference between being let alone and being private. Being let alone - it's possible to have all of your less honorable aspects well-known and still be let alone, as I have discovered in my own little town in Wyoming where I have no privacy at all. But, unfortunately, we have- certainly in this country and many others - governments that use one's small shortcomings as leverage to get a kind of compliance. And we have a zest for privacy in America which is a direct reflection of the secrecy of our institutions. If our institutions were less those of a police state, which I believe they are, I think people would be a lot more comfortable about being open and we would have a healthier society. But in the meantime I think it's absolutely critical that people have the right to determine their own level of privacy.
E.R.: You say that in your small town you have no privacy. In physical "meat space" as you call it, are you comfortable with your neighbors? Do you get along well with them?
Barlow: I would say so. I think they think I'm some kind of weirdo, but I'm their weirdo. And, yeah, I get along with them pretty well. And I get along with people pretty well. I've also learned that if you don't judge them harshly, they are far less inclined to judge you harshly.
E.R.: Do you find that personal, physical contact with people is less important or more important now than it was before the creation of cyberspace?
Barlow: Oh, I think it's critical, and actually I think one of the marvelous things about cyberspace is that it creates both the opportunity and the willingness to have face-to-face contact with lots of different people. There is this widespread - and I think profoundly wrong - notion that people will go online and forsake the physical world. Nothing, in my experience, could be further from the truth, because you go online and it breaks the surface tension of lots of relationships that you would never have otherwise. And there is a natural human tendency to expand the bandwidth of any human interaction that is meaningful, which is to say that you start out with some little bit of ASCII and climb up that spectrum of interaction until you get to the point where you are at the highest level of information exchange, which is face to face; or really, you know, making love. And I have noticed that the people who spend a lot of time online also are much more inclined to be social, including a lot of people who weren't inclined to be social to begin with. The original people who were online were socially uncomfortable folks, by and large, who managed to use that environment as training wheels for other kinds of broader social interaction.
E.R.: One of the stereotypes, accurate or not, is that people online tend to "flame" each other, as the expression goes, more often than other people.
Barlow: Well, I think people who first get online do a lot of that and I suppose that some of it goes on even after you are used to it. I haven't quite got to the point where I'm completely immune to it myself.
E.R.: To flaming or being flamed?
Barlow: Flaming. Well, certainly I'm not immune to being flamed. I get flamed all the time. But flaming - I think that's partly because you really want to have some kind of an effect and since you can't actually measure the effect you are having in the way that you can in the physical world, and since you can't easily put the quietus on somebody else physically, it is easy to overdo it. You really want to show to yourself that you're making a difference in the way that somebody looks at things and it's easy to think that saying it louder is going to help.
E.R.: What about a different kind of unwelcome mail - what do you think of junk mail?
Barlow: Oh, I think it's a blight. If anything encourages me to flame people, it's being sent junk mail online. There's no excuse for it. It's completely counter-productive. It clutters the environment. It makes me really angry. If you're talking about that kind of thing, commercialization of cyberspace, I'm utterly opposed to it, but largely because it's not useful to the people that are trying to do it. It just becomes a blight to the rest of us.
E.R.: But is there a tension between privacy and free expression here?
Barlow: There is always a tension between privacy and freedom of expression.
E.R.: Well, what if the junk mail, for example, invites the recipient to visit a so-called adult site, and the recipient objects to receiving such invitations?
Barlow: Well, there's a hell of a lot of that in America Online. That's why I canceled my own and my children's America Online account, in part, because they were being bombarded with solicitations for sleazy material. Now I don't think we should do anything legally about that. But I think everybody should make the choice that they feel comfortable with about putting themselves in the way of it or not. If you are going to go out to that sort of site, you should have the right to do it, but you shouldn't be encouraged to do it. You shouldn't have to put up with being encouraged to do it involuntarily.
E.R.: Hypothetically, suppose the level of that solicitation went up by an order of magnitude or two orders of magnitude - ?
Barlow: I think it would be highly unlikely that it did, but hypothetically -
E.R.: Would you then think of any legal fix on that?
Barlow: No, for a variety of reasons. First of all, I think that the market will take care of that. But, more to the point, I don't know who has the authority to impose those kinds of sanctions - you know, what external force has the right or ability to do that. Is it the government of the United States or the government of Saudi Arabia or the government of Iran, the government of the People's Republic of China?
E.R.: Changing gears, then, just to get a reference point, what would you think about the government's attempt to regulate access of cigarettes to minors?
Barlow: Well I think they are folly. Minors are obviously going to go on smoking. I don't think the war on cigarettes is going to be any more successful than the war on some drugs has been.
E.R.: But folly in the sense that it won't be successful, or in the sense that it's inappropriate?
Barlow: I think it is somewhat inappropriate. First of all, I don't think that you can ever regulate against human desire regardless of how sordid or low it may be.
E.R.: No, but then you can't regulate traffic, for that matter.
Barlow: You can if it's in the general public interest that you do so. You can set up a set of standards that people decide are in their best interests to meet, and I think that what regulates traffic is the general public's willingness to believe that those standards are for everybody's benefit. What I see going on increasingly with government is trying to create standards that are for the benefit of government or for the benefit of a particular social class or culture in society and for the oppression of other social classes and cultures.
E.R.: For example?
Barlow: Well, for example, in the war on some drugs, you've got an older culture and a whiter culture that has its own drug of choice, namely alcohol, trying to impose its will on cultures that don't use that as their principal drug of choice. And it's purely cultural. It has very little, indeed nothing to do with the social safety, since the most dangerous drug in society is alcohol. So that's one example of the kind of thing I'm talking about, and I think we've also got a Puritan culture trying very hard to impose its morality sexually on a society that may not be so strait-laced here in our country and elsewhere. I think people should have the right to practice their own morality, whatever it might be, so long as they are not trying to impose it on someone else.
E.R.: So what you are suggesting really is that rather than regulation there should be education.
Barlow: Absolutely. For example, if I didn't want my kids looking at pornography, I would raise them to find it as distasteful as I do; and I have. I confronted the topic and said, "Look, what do you think of this?" And they all thought it was yucky. And we talked about the replacement of the actual with the image of the actual and why there might be something corrosive and diminishing about this. I didn't ask the government to go out and act on my behalf and deal with what ought to be my own parental responsibility.
E.R.: What about the responsibilities of educational institutions, starting at the primary level and going to the institutions of higher education? Do you see any particular new responsibilities vis-�-vis the Internet and the Web?
Barlow: I think that the responsibility of the university and the educational community in general has been to make as much of the intellectual works of humanity available as possible - available in the broader sense, both literally available and intellectually available. And the university particularly has always been a place where there has been a sanctuary for discourse that might be extremely uncomfortable in the rest of society. And for that reason I think one of the responsibilities of academia is to see that students have completely open access to all the world that may be available electronically.
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Cassidy
Lyrics by John Perry Barlow With Bob Weir Recorded on Ace (Warner Brothers, 1972) Cora, Wyoming February, 1972
I have seen where the wolf has slept by the silver stream. I can tell by the mark he left you were in his dream. Ah, child of countless trees. Ah, child of boundless seas. What you are, what you're meant to be Speaks his name, though you were born to me, Born to me, Cassidy... Lost now on the country miles in his Cadillac. I can tell by the way you smile he's rolling back. Come wash the nighttime clean, Come grow this scorched ground green, Blow the horn, tap the tambourine Close the gap of the dark years in between You and me, Cassidy... Quick beats in an icy heart. Catch-colt draws a coffin cart. There he goes now, here she starts: Hear her cry. Flight of the seabirds, scattered like lost words Wheel to the storm and fly. Faring thee well now. Let your life proceed by its own design. Nothing to tell now. Let the words be yours, I'm done with mine. (Repeat)