Remembering John Perry Barlow
Elder of Cyberspace
I came across this tweet today.
Every time I am reminded of John Perry Barlow, I am also reminded of those heady days in the early 1990s when I first learned about the internet and first heard the word “cyberspace.”
For me at the time John Perry Barlow personified the spirit of the age. Those were the days of Mondo 2000 and Wired magazine. The days when I got my first real PC (actually a Mac). They were also the days when the underground electronic music scene was raging across the UK - free parties and techno, LSD and a strong sense of revolution in the air. Those were the days before Facebook and Google, the days when normal folk had yet to discover the internet and it was still a playground for the geeks and idealists. It was Barlow and his writing that convinced me that the internet was what I wanted to do with my life.
John Perry Barlow was remarkably open about his use of LSD and other psychedelics. He didn’t treat them as party drugs. He saw them as ways to think differently. His experiences with psychedelics shaped his worldview, his music, and his ideas about the internet.
Barlow framed psychedelic use as a matter of what he called “cognitive liberty,” the idea that you should have the right to explore your own consciousness. He didn’t say everyone should take LSD, but he was adamant that everyone should have the right to.
The connection between LSD and the rise of personal computing is something that doesn’t get talked about enough. A lot of the people who designed the digital world were taking acid. For more on this I’d recommend the books From Satori to Silicon Valley: San Francisco and the American Counterculture and What the Dormouse said.
Of all Barlow’s works, “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace” will always have the most resonance, for me at least. It’s a gorgeous piece of writing and although many now see it as a failed prophecy, I think we have yet to reach the end of this story and it’s premature to call it just yet.
I like being reminded of Barlow in these days of the corporate internet, government censorship and divisive social media. It’s good to remember the hopes people had for this technology. Naive, maybe, but they mattered.
Barlow himself, in his later years, admitted he underestimated how effectively corporations and governments would colonise the web. But he never stopped believing that connecting human minds was a good thing, maybe even a necessary one. The internet is just a tool. What we do with it is still an open question.
I still think the internet has a part to play in whatever comes next for us. I can’t prove it, but I feel it.