25 Years Later: A Celebration Of The Declaration Of The Independence Of Cyberspace

from the a-look-back dept

As we've been noting in posts throughout the day, today is the day that, 25 years ago, then President Bill Clinton signed into law the Telecommunications Act of 1996. That large telco bill included, among many other things, the Communications Decency Act, a dangerous censorial bill written by Senator James Exon. However, buried in the CDA was a separate bill, written by now Senator Ron Wyden and then Representative Chris Cox, the Internet Freedom and Family Empowerment Act, which today is generally known as Section 230 of the CDA. A legal challenge later tossed out all of Exon's bill as blatantly unconstitutional.

However, on the day of the signing, most of the internet activist space wasn't even thinking about Section 230. They were greatly concerned by Exon's parts of the CDA and some other provisions in the Telecommunications Act that they feared could cause more harm than good. This inspired John Perry Barlow to write his now famous Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, which was also released 25 years ago today. It's worth reading and reflecting on it 25 years later:

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace

Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of 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.

We have no elected government, nor are we likely to have one, so I address you with no greater authority than that with which liberty itself always speaks. I declare the global social space we are building to be naturally independent of the tyrannies you seek to impose on us. You have no moral right to rule us nor do you possess any methods of enforcement we have true reason to fear.

Governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. You have neither solicited nor received ours. We did not invite you. You do not know us, nor do you know our world. Cyberspace does not lie within your borders. Do not think that you can build it, as though it were a public construction project. You cannot. It is an act of nature and it grows itself through our collective actions.

You have not engaged in our great and gathering conversation, nor did you create the wealth of our marketplaces. You do not know our culture, our ethics, or the unwritten codes that already provide our society more order than could be obtained by any of your impositions.

You claim there are problems among us that you need to solve. You use this claim as an excuse to invade our precincts. Many of these problems don't exist. Where there are real conflicts, where there are wrongs, we will identify them and address them by our means. We are forming our own Social Contract. This governance will arise according to the conditions of our world, not yours. Our world is different.

Cyberspace consists of transactions, relationships, and thought itself, arrayed like a standing wave in the web of our communications. Ours is a world that is both everywhere and nowhere, but it is not where bodies live.

We are creating a world that all may enter without privilege or prejudice accorded by race, economic power, military force, or station of birth.

We are creating a world where anyone, anywhere may express his or her beliefs, no matter how singular, without fear of being coerced into silence or conformity.

Your legal concepts of property, expression, identity, movement, and context do not apply to us. They are all based on matter, and there is no matter here.

Our identities have no bodies, so, unlike you, we cannot obtain order by physical coercion. We believe that from ethics, enlightened self-interest, and the commonweal, our governance will emerge. Our identities may be distributed across many of your jurisdictions. The only law that all our constituent cultures would generally recognize is the Golden Rule. We hope we will be able to build our particular solutions on that basis. But we cannot accept the solutions you are attempting to impose.

In the United States, you have today created a law, the Telecommunications Reform Act, which repudiates your own Constitution and insults the dreams of Jefferson, Washington, Mill, Madison, DeToqueville, and Brandeis. These dreams must now be born anew in us.

You are terrified of your own children, since they are natives in a world where you will always be immigrants. Because you fear them, you entrust your bureaucracies with the parental responsibilities you are too cowardly to confront yourselves. In our world, all the sentiments and expressions of humanity, from the debasing to the angelic, are parts of a seamless whole, the global conversation of bits. We cannot separate the air that chokes from the air upon which wings beat.

In China, Germany, France, Russia, Singapore, Italy and the United States, you are trying to ward off the virus of liberty by erecting guard posts at the frontiers of Cyberspace. These may keep out the contagion for a small time, but they will not work in a world that will soon be blanketed in bit-bearing media.

Your increasingly obsolete information industries would perpetuate themselves by proposing laws, in America and elsewhere, that claim to own speech itself throughout the world. These laws would declare ideas to be another industrial product, no more noble than pig iron. In our world, whatever the human mind may create can be reproduced and distributed infinitely at no cost. The global conveyance of thought no longer requires your factories to accomplish.

These increasingly hostile and colonial measures place us in the same position as those previous lovers of freedom and self-determination who had to reject the authorities of distant, uninformed powers. We must declare our virtual selves immune to your sovereignty, even as we continue to consent to your rule over our bodies. We will spread ourselves across the Planet so that no one can arrest our thoughts.

We will create a civilization of the Mind in Cyberspace. May it be more humane and fair than the world your governments have made before.

Davos, Switzerland
February 8, 1996

Barlow later admitted that he wrote it in a somewhat rushed fashion while attending a party at the World Economic Forum, saying that he would write parts of it, go dance, and then go back to writing. He said that "less distraction might have yielded a more thoughtful document, but things were as they were."

And yet, the document lives on -- celebrated by some, denigrated by some. It's used by some to highlight the special place the internet holds in our lives, while used by others as the quintessential example of techno-exceptionalism run amok.

I still think of it as more of a vision -- a goal for what an internet could be, rather than a declaration of what it was. It was a shining star for what the internet might be possible to achieve, with an underlying recognition that policymakers and regulators who never truly understood the internet and its usefulness, would seek to undermine or destroy. People can see in it whatever they wish to see -- good or bad -- and that too is part of the promise and wonder of today's modern internet.

At the very least, it's worthwhile to read again on its 25th anniversary and to remember that possibility. The internet was and is something different than we've seen before in society. That has enabled so many wonderful things -- and some less pleasant things. But let's not forget the good just because we've now recognized the bad abuses of the internet as well.

Filed Under: declaration of independence of cyberspace, john perry barlow, open internet, section 230

The Barlowian Internet: The Faults Of The Internet Are Also Its Opportunity, But It's Up To Us To Embrace Them

from the a-remembrance dept

John Perry Barlow is all too frequently held up as the patron saint of a sort of "techno-utopian" internet, in which the internet will save us all and open up all sorts of wonderment and good feels -- and all the bad stuff is whisked away on a rainbow cloud of TCP/IP. Critics of Barlow sometimes delight in mocking his flowery language or predictions that didn't come quite true (though many did). They especially delight in pointing to the current internet hellscape as proof that Barlow's vision of the internet-for-good was a vision through impossibly rose-colored glasses. As I noted upon his passing, this is a near total misunderstanding of Barlow, who saw both the promise and the peril of the internet, and his writings were designed as a call to action for those developing the future (i.e., all of us), to embrace the good and avoid the bad. His presentments were an attempt to urge us all in the right direction, not a suggestion that that direction was inevitable, or easy, or guaranteed.

That framing is useful context for reading through an amazing collection of essays and reflections on Barlow put together by Duke's Law & Technology review, in what it has entitled The Past and Future of The Internet: A Symposium for John Perry Barlow. Edited by Jamie Boyle, with some amazing contributions from folks like Cindy Cohn, Cory Doctorow, Yochai Benkler, Pam Samuelson, Jessica Litman, Jonathan Zittrain and more, it's absolutely worth reading, no matter where you stand on Barlow and his legacy. It is not -- as you might think -- a hagiography designed solely to praise Barlow. Indeed, it contains quite a few essays that are critical of Barlow -- arguing that he was over-optimistic, that he didn't recognize the downsides of the internet, and that he was misguided in his views of how the internet and (especially) copyright law might change over time.

There is much in this collection of essays that are thought-provoking and challenging (just as Barlow himself often was). Boyle's own contribution, which I'd argue is incorrectly titled Is The Internet Over?! (Again?), might be seen as a summation of all the papers in the rest of the collection, but I actually think it's much more important than that. Towards the beginning of his piece, Boyle laments the fact that so many of his law students don't actually understand how the internet works. And, that's a much bigger problem than you might think:

I teach at a law school that has world-class faculty and brilliant students. Their breadth of learning humbles me on a daily basis. But many of them do not understand the network architecture that is so central to their lives. Of course, it is not their specialty. Yet they understand the basic explanation of anthropogenic climate-change, the idea of externalities in economics, the broad strokes of the history of civil rights in the United States, the debate about whether minimum wages are good for poor workers and the issues raised by the use of drones in armed conflict. They fluently invoke the concept of noir cinema and make jokes about magical realist fiction when a faculty meeting turns bizarre. They are, in short, profoundly well-rounded, educated people, knowledgeable beyond their own specialties. But they do not really understand the internet or the world wide web. That is a shame.

It is a shame because understanding the most important communications network of our time, the network for our culture and news and search and flirting and shopping and politics, is central to knowing how—or whether—to regulate it. To build on it. To use it. As I will try to explain, some of the features of the internet that its critics view as its main problems—anonymity, the fact that anyone can connect to the internet and say anything, the difficulty of filtering it or managing it, its decentralized anarchic governance—are also among its transformative and engaging features. It is a shame for us not to understand all this because the network that shapes our cognitive world, defines our markets, and runs our infrastructure is as important as the rest of the things a “well-rounded person” knows about. But it is also a shame because Berners-Lee’s idea was beautiful. It was an idea that a scholar would come up with and that a scholar would love. Now it is central to our world. Yet somehow it progressed from bizarre novelty to essential utility without ever passing through the intermediate stage of public comprehension.

And while he's actually talking about the work of Tim Berners-Lee here, rather than Barlow, I think much of the same applies to Barlow and his vision of the world, and why so many are perplexed by it or misinterpret it. In the same sense that so many people see only the "techno-utopian" appeals of Barlow, they see only the downsides, negatives, and costs of today's internet. What they miss is that these two things are, in many ways, connected at the hip. What enables all this good stuff is also what enables the bad. What enables boundless creativity and optimism and innovations... also enables surveillance, centralized dominant platforms, trolls and more.

Barlow wasn't ever saying that we'd get one without the other. He was saying that we need to truly understand the upside to better protect against the downside -- and his (reasonable) fear was that in trying to fight back against the very real downsides, people, who did not understand the overall system and how it worked together, would very much destroy the good of the internet in a short-sighted focus on the bad.

That risk remains more true today than ever before.

Indeed, to those who say that Barlow was just a purely techno-utopian dreamer, Doctorow's piece has the perfect antidote:

When Barlow advocated for a free internet––“free” in all the usefully overlapping and ambiguous senses of that word––he wasn’t doing so because he lacked an appreciation of the risks of a monopolized internet, or an internet that was under the thumb of a repressive state. Rather, he did so precisely because he feared that a globe-spanning network of ubiquitous, sensor-studded, actuating devices that were designed and governed without some kind of ethical commitment, without the pioneering spirit of the early internet and its yeoman smallholders who defended it from those who sought to dominate or pervert it, that we would arrive at a dystopian future where the entertainment industry’s Huxelyism was the means for realizing the nightmares of Orwell.

You don’t found an organization like the Electronic Frontier Foundation because you are sanguine about the future of the internet: you do so because your hope for an amazing, open future is haunted by terror of a network suborned for the purposes of spying and control.

But there's a flip side to all of this, some of which comes out in the essays -- though I wish there were more. Barlow's hope is very much out of favor today, even if many of his claims about the good of the internet did, in fact, come true. Along with it came much of the bad, and the prevailing narrative today seems to dismiss all of the good and focus solely on the bad. The days of merely concerning ourselves with the fights over copyright online have mostly fallen by the wayside, with so much focus now on things like terrorist content, mis- and disinformation, human trafficking, illegal drug abuse, trolls, hate speech, and more.

But the key point is still there. The key, underlying truth behind what Barlow meant to the internet remains. Yes, the open and free internet has enabled all of this. But it has enabled so much more that is good and useful and innovative and powerful. And we should not forget that. Indeed, forgetting it, and focusing solely on the bad stuff is a recipe for destruction of that which is good on the internet. It is exactly what Barlow feared most.

Those of us who fight to keep the internet open and free don't do it because we're ignoring or downplaying the bad things that have occurred and do exist on the internet. We're not blind to the power that a few large companies have taken in shaping the current internet. But we're fearful of how misguided attempts to stop the bad are almost always being done without an understanding of the flipside. As Boyle notes in his essay, it's that lack of understanding and recognition that, yes, anonymity can lead to trolling, but it can also lead to amazing communities where the oppressed and isolated can connect with others and work for a better world. Yes, the fact that the internet is open can lead to greedy surveillance or companies trying to observe our every move -- but it also enables anyone to create something amazing, whether for fun or for profit, and has created tons of new jobs, new products, new services, and just plain fun. Yes, governments can use the internet for oppression and surveillance, but people can use it to organize and make change as well.

The point Barlow was pushing for was that we need to understand the good opportunities to know how to stop the overreaction in the other direction. Yes, it's important to think about ways to limit all of the bad stuff described above, but we need to do it in ways that enhance the good, not kill it off. We should encourage privacy through encryption, not deputizing large companies to "protect" us. We should encourage competition through making it easier for new internet services to come about, not through locking in the dominance of Facebook and Google as "utilities." We should encourage good behavior online by allowing for widespread experimentation in models to figure out what works for each community, rather than mandating a strict course of action that all platforms must follow.

John Perry Barlow saw the good and the bad of the internet, and recognized, inherently, that they were tied together. He promoted the utopian possibilities of the internet not because he was ignorant of the bad side, but because he knew that if people didn't recognize those possibilities, they'd likely be snuffed out in an overzealous attempt to protect us from the "bad" stuff that came with it. As we're now in an era where many of Barlow's worst fears are within the realm of possibility, now is the time to revisit Barlow's vision and understanding.

We need to understand the possibilities and opportunities of the internet -- not because we're utopians who think it's coming naturally. But because we know that without understanding what's possible, we'll lock it away forever.

Filed Under: digital rights, free and open internet, james boyle, john perry barlow, opportunities, optimism, techno utopian

Mike Godwin Remembers John Perry Barlow

from the more-rememberances dept

Earlier today we posted Mike Masnick's post about the passing of John Perry Barlow, but Mike Godwin, who was EFF's first lawyer among other things, sent over his memories of Barlow as well, which are well worth reading.

It’s the nature of having known John Perry Barlow, and having been his friend, that you can’t write about what it means to have lost him Wednesday morning (he died in his sleep at the too-young age of 70) without writing about how he changed your life. So, I ask your forgiveness in advance if I say too much about myself here on the way to saying more about John.

I can and will testify that I had a life before I met John Perry Barlow. At the beginning of 1990 I was finishing up law school in Texas (only one more semester and then the bar exam!) and was beginning to think about my professional future (how about being a prosecutor in Houston?) and my personal future (should my long-term girlfriend and I get married?).

That was the glide path I was on before Grateful Dead lyricist John Perry Barlow, together with software entrepreneur Mitch Kapor and Sun Microsystems pioneering programmer John Gilmore, decided to start what would shortly be known as the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). EFF disrupted all my inertial, half-formed plans and changed my life forever. (I didn’t, for example, become a prosecutor.) And John Perry Barlow was the red-hot beating heart of EFF.

I’d been feeling tremors in the Force before EFF even had a name, though. For reasons I can’t quite explain, I’d found ways to persuade people, including my university, to give me access to internet-capable accounts and services so that I could see the rest of the digital world as it was then represented in Usenet. I’d been a BBS hobbyist in the 1980s, but I thought I’d exhausted the BBS scene in Austin and wanted to know more of the larger digital world. Thanks to Usenet, over the Christmas break before my last semester of law school I’d become friends online with Clifford Stoll, whose book “The Cuckoo’s Egg” detailed how he had detected and helped thwart a foreign plot to hack into U.S. academic and research computers. Cliff had included his email address in the book and, as we so often did in those days, I just fired off a note to him and got to know him.

At about the same time, at my girlfriend’s urging, we spent a couple of days in San Francisco at MacWorld Expo, where I first met Mitch Kapor, who wore a Hawaiian shirt and demo’d what became for years my favorite Mac application, On Location. Other things were happening as well, and my computer-hobbyist nature— never too far in the background during my law-student years—kept me attuned to what seemed to be happening in the larger world which, as I would have framed it back then, seemed to reflect a convergence of my interests in constitutional law and cyberspace.

Just a month or two later, I came across the March 1990 issue of Harper’s Magazine, and there on the cover was this colloquy edited by Jack Hitt and Paul Tough titled, “Is Computer Hacking a Crime? (Harper’s theoretically makes a download of that old article available, but the links don’t work. You can find a transcribed version here). I wasn’t a subscriber, but I knew I had to read this. And there was Barlow – whose name I didn’t recognize – along with luminaries like Stewart Brand (former Merry Prankster, later the founder of The Whole Earth Catalog and The Whole Earth Review), Richard Stallman (founder and chief visionary of the Free Software movement that gave birth to the Linux operating system) and my new friend Cliff Stoll. They all had lots of opinions about computer hacking, but the participant whose words spoke most clearly to me was Barlow:

“BARLOW [Day 1, 11:54 A.M.]: Hackers hack. Yeah, right, but what's more to the point is that humans hack and always have. 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 -- ant colonies, Canada geese -- take for granted. This is important, because combined with our itch to probe is a need to connect. Humans miss the almost telepathic connectedness that I've observed in other herding mammals. And we want it back. Ironically, the solitary sociopath and his 3:00 A.M. endeavors hold the most promise for delivering species reunion.”

This was a guy who really got it! A guy who recognized the itchiness in my brain compelling me to stay up nights finding ways to get into campus mainframes back in the 1970s, that had me tinkering with Apple II computers, with PCs and with Macs in the 1980s, and that had driven me to join the global Usenet conversation in just the last few months. Barlow saw that what we were doing with computers now (that is, in the 1980s and 1990s, at the dawn of the public internet) was essentially human—that human beings, being what they are, couldn’t stop themselves from doing it. And look at the line Barlow draws in this contribution (his first in the public colloquy in Harper’s)--it’s a line connecting human beings’ invention/discovery of fire (or “fire hacking”) with our use of computers to communicate with one another. “This is important, because combined with our itch to probe is the need to connect.” We miss our “almost telepathic connectedness.” And, as Barlow wrote, “we want it back.”

During my law school years—as well as the year I took off to serve as editor of the University of Texas student newspaper, The Daily Texan—I’d relied on computer BBSes to stay connected with people outside my studies, outside my work. Yet I’d begun to recognize that computer communications were just the same kinds of speech that our Constitution and Bill of Rights were meant to protect. I tried to persuade a favorite professor to let me write a research paper, for credit, on the First Amendment and computer bulletin boards. The professor (an immensely well-regarded First Amendment scholar, and deservedly so) shut me down, essentially saying that First Amendment doctrine was all settled, and that computer bulletin-board systems didn’t really alter fundamental questions about, say, publisher liability or what counts as speech or the press. Barlow, speaking in the Harper’s-sponsored forum on the WELL’s conferencing system, had seen something in the nascent online world that my professor had missed, and that I’d already had inklings about.

You also see in Barlow’s participation in that Harper’s forum certain long-term traits that sometimes bugged those of us who loved him. Barlow frequently yielded to the temptation to utter oracular pronouncements, to jump to conclusions before he’d done the reading. In what started out as a minor contretemps with “Acid Phreak” and “Phiber Optik,” participants who championed the exploratory hacking of computer systems—especially those of corporate giants—Barlow wrote this:

“BARLOW [Day 19, 9:48 P.M.]: Let me define my terms. Using hacker in a midspectrum sense (with crackers on one end and Leonardo da Vinci on the other), I think it does take a kind of genius to be a truly productive hacker. I'm learning PASCAL now, and I am constantly amazed that people can string those prolix recursions into something like PageMaker. It fills me with the kind of awe I reserve for splendors such as the cathedral at Chartres. With crackers like Acid and Optik, the issue is less intelligence than alienation. Trade their modems for skateboards and only a slight conceptual shift would occur. Yet I'm glad they're wedging open the cracks. Let a thousand worms flourish.”

To which Phiber Optik responded with this:

“OPTIK [Day 10, 10:11 P.M.]: You have some pair of balls comparing my talent with that of a skateboarder. Hmm... This was indeed boring, but nonetheless: [Editor's note: At this point in the discussion, Optik -- apparently having hacked into TRW's computer records -- posted a copy of Mr. Barlow's credit history. In the interest of Mr. Barlow's privacy -- at least what's left of it -- Harper's Magazine has not printed it.] I'm not showing off. Any fool knowing the proper syntax and the proper passwords can look up credit history. I just find your high-and-mighty attitude annoying and, yes, infantile.”

Barlow was stunned, just as you or I would have been, to see TRW’s version of his credit history—including its errors—published online. But the next thing he did was brilliant, and it’s not something anyone else would necessarily do. As Barlow recounts it in an article he wrote later that spring:

“I've been in redneck bars wearing shoulder-length curls, police custody while on acid, and Harlem after midnight, but no one has ever put the spook in me quite as Phiber Optik did at that moment. I realized that we had problems which exceeded the human conductivity of the WELL's bandwidth. If someone were about to paralyze me with a spell, I wanted a more visceral sense of him than could fit through a modem.

“I e-mailed him asking him to give me a phone call. I told him I wouldn't insult his skills by giving him my phone number and, with the assurance conveyed by that challenge, I settled back and waited for the phone to ring. Which, directly, it did.

“In this conversation and the others that followed I encountered an intelligent, civilized, and surprisingly principled kid of 18 who sounded, and continues to sound, as though there's little harm in him to man or data. His cracking impulses seemed purely exploratory, and I've begun to wonder if we wouldn't also regard spelunkers as desperate criminals if AT&T owned all the caves.”

This is where you see one of Barlow’s great gifts, fully as much of a talent as his lyrical wordsmithing. Barlow saw past his own feelings of fear and uncertainty and reached out to the human being behind the hacker handle, and found, in Phiber Optik, someone who deserved, in Barlow’s view, more admiration than fear. As he wrote about it in 1990, “The terrifying poses which Optik and Acid had been striking on screen were a media-amplified example of a human adaptation I'd seen before: One becomes as he is beheld. They were simply living up to what they thought we and, more particularly, the editors of Harper's, expected of them. Like the televised tears of disaster victims, their snarls adapted easily to mass distribution.”

Barlow also wrote this:

“Months later, Harper's took Optik, Acid and me to dinner at a Manhattan restaurant which, though very fancy, was appropriately Chinese. Acid and Optik, as material beings, were well-scrubbed and fashionably-clad. They looked to be dangerous as ducks.”

They looked to be dangerous as ducks. I’d have given a toe, or maybe even finger, to have written a sentence that apt.

Barlow’s larger insight—that maybe our sense of the threats of computers and the internet and the first generation of human beings to grow up with super-duper computer skills was just another iteration of our human fear of change and the new—informed Barlow’s co-founding of a new civil-liberties organization, originally pitched as the “the Computer Liberty Foundation.” The other co-founders—Mitch Kapor and John Gilmore, themselves breathtakingly remarkable people just as much as Barlow was (here I first typed “as Barlow is” because he still feels so present)—recognized that “Computer Liberty Foundation” was a bit clunky. Barlow, the poet who’d also been a rancher in Pinedale, Wyoming, coined the name that stuck: Electronic Frontier Foundation.

EFF, which was then primarily just Barlow, Kapor, and Gilmore, eventually decided they needed an in-house lawyer to help with the legal cases that were bubbling up with increasing frequency. I’d already been active in publicizing those cases, starting as a law student, then as a recent law graduate, even as I was studying for the Texas bar exam. Marc Rotenberg, then head of the Washington office of the Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility, had reached out to me as a possible staff member; CPSR was the recipient of EFF’s first grant for cyberspace legal research, and they needed to staff up. Rotenberg flew me to EFF’s first big press conference—this at the Washington Press Club—and it was there that I met Kapor (again) and Barlow for the first time. I got to hang out with these guys not just that day but also in the evening at a dinner meeting that included other people who’d later be EFF supporters and even board members. The main thing I remember from the dinner meeting is talking to Barlow—he’d called himself an “information mystic” (I think he was just trying out the term for size), and I piped up about Claude Shannon and information theory and my understanding of information as something more scientific than mystical. Of course, Barlow already knew about Shannon, about Teilhard de Chardin’s notion of the “noosphere,” about Aristotle’s precursor concept of “substantial form.” I knew instantly that I would get along with this guy.

I got recruited, not just by CPSR, but by EFF, and I became EFF’s first staff counsel (and, in fact, EFF’s first full-time employee). The nine years I spent at EFF were my first nine years as a lawyer, and every single one of those years was a year of revelation, always informed by Barlow’s openness, adventurousness and willingness to grapple with new problems and new ideas.

Ultimately, Barlow didn’t think every looming problem in cyberspace was no more dangerous than a duck. Like the rest of us at EFF (which began to expand in the following years), Barlow recognized the fear of encryption technology, the fear of computer-facilitated copyright infringement, the fear of “cyberporn” as the kind of neophobia so common in eras of technological change. When Congress passed the Communications Decency Act in 1996, which would have imposed massive censorship on the now-blooming internet, he channeled the anxiety all of us were feeling into his crafting of “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace.”

I confess I didn’t much like this Declaration when Barlow shared it and later published it. With what Barlow admitted was “characteristic grandiosity,” the Declaration asserted that traditional, terrestrial governments “have no sovereignty where we gather” (that is, in cyberspace), and that “the global social space we are building” is “naturally independent of the tyrannies you seek to impose upon us.” By then I was already deep in my work for EFF on the constitutional challenge to the Communications Decency Act, and the hard fact that haunted my days was how fragile this new global social space was, and how little independence of the tyrannies it might ultimately have.

I was missing the forest for the trees. The simple fact is this: Barlow inspired a new generation of lawyers and activists to devote time and energy into preserving the great new world the internet and other digital technologies was giving us. As I wrote earlier this year in an essay for Cato Unbound:

“Here I must share some late-breaking news from the 1990s: the actual cyber-activists of that period (and here I must include myself) did not interpret Barlow’s cri de coeur as political philosophy. Barlow, best known prior to his co-founding of the Electronic Frontier Foundation as a songwriter for the Grateful Dead, was writing to inspire activism, not to prescribe a new world order, and his goal was to be lyrical and aspirational, not legislative. Barlow wrote and published his “Declaration” in the short days and weeks after Congress passed, and President Clinton signed into law, a telecommunications bill that aimed, in part, to censor the internet. No serious person – and certainly not the Electronic Frontier Foundation and other organizations that successfully challenged the Communications Decency Act provisions of that bill – believed that cyberspace would be “automagically” independent of the terrestrial world and its governments. Barlow’s “Declaration” is best understood, as Wired described it two decades later, as a “rallying cry.” Similarly, nobody thinks “The Star-Spangled Banner” or “America the Beautiful” or “This Land Is Your Land” is a constitution. (And of course the original Declaration of Independence isn’t one either.)”

Barlow had written his own inspirational anthem, and I’d like to think he’d particularly appreciate my comparing it to Woody Guthrie’s great song.

I can say one more thing about Barlow—about seeing him once again, for the last time in person, when a couple of friends and I visited him in spring of 2016 at John Gilmore’s house, where Barlow was continuing his long efforts at recovery from a heart attack and other problems that had reduced his mobility and energy but had not diminished his fundamentally optimistic outlook—optimism not just for himself and those he loved but for all of us. It was good to talk to John Perry Barlow that evening, to chat about nothing in particular, to reminisce a little. I had loved the man pretty much from the start and, circumstances being what they were, it was not the simple love of hero-worship from an adoring fan. Instead, it was the complicated, tricky love for someone with whom I got to share so many great moments of my life over many great (and not-so-great) years. It’s the love you end up having for lifelong friends, or for family members you’ve occasionally quarreled with over the years, but with whom you’ve shared so much, and with whom you’ve been able to do so much good work, that even when you disagree with them, you know ultimately all will be forgiven.

I can tell you what it felt like to sit down and catch up a bit with John Perry Barlow that last time. It felt like coming home.

Mike Godwin (mnemonic@gmail.com) is a Distinguished Senior Fellow with R Street Institute.

Filed Under: john perry barlow, mike godwin
Companies: eff

End Of An Era: Saying Goodbye To John Perry Barlow

from the pioneer dept

I was in a meeting yesterday, when the person I was meeting with mentioned that John Perry Barlow had died. While he had been sick for a while, and there had been warnings that the end might be near, it's still somewhat devastating to hear that he is gone. I had the pleasure of interacting with him both in person and online multiple times over the years, and each time was a joy. He was always, insightful, thoughtful and deeply empathetic.

I can't remember for sure, but I believe the last time I saw him in person was a few years back at a conference (I don't even recall what conference), where he was on a panel that had no moderator, and literally seconds before the panel was to begin, I was asked to moderate the panel with zero preparation. Of course, it was easy to get Barlow to talk, and to make it interesting, even without preparation. But that day the Grateful Dead's Bob Weir (for whom Barlow wrote many songs -- after meeting as roommates at boarding school) was in the audience -- and while the two were close, they disagreed on issues related to copyright, leading to a public debate between the two (even though Weir was not on the panel). It was fascinating to observe the discussion, in part because of the way in which Barlow approached it. Despite disagreeing strongly with Weir, the discussion was respectful, detailed and consistently insightful.

Lots of people are, quite understandably, pointing to Barlow's famous Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace (which was published 22 years ago today). Barlow later admitted that he dashed most of that off in a bar during the World Economic Forum, without much thought. And that's why I'm going to separately suggest two other things by Barlow to read as well. The first was his Wired piece, The Economy of Ideas from 1994, the second year of Wired's existence, and where Barlow's wisdom was found in every issue. Despite being written almost a quarter of a century ago, The Economy of Ideas is still fresh and relevant today. It is more thoughtful and detailed than his later "Declaration" and, if anything, I would imagine that Barlow was annoyed that the piece is still so relevant today. He'd think we should be way beyond the points he was making in 1994, but we are not.

The other piece is more recent I've seen a few people pointing to is his Principles of Adult Behavior, which are a list of 25 rules to live by -- rules that we should be reminded of constantly. Rules that many of us (and I'm putting myself first on this list) fail to live up to all too frequently. Update I stupidly assumed that was a more recent writing by Barlow, but as noted in the comments (thanks!) it's actually from 1977 when Barlow turned 30.

Cindy Cohn, who is now the executive director of EFF, which Barlow co-founded, mentions in her writeup how unfair it is that Barlow (and, specifically his Declaration) are often held up as the kind of prototype for the "techno-utopian" vision of the world that has become so frequently mocked today. Yet, as Cohn points out, that's not at all how Barlow truly viewed the world. He saw the possibilities of that utopia, while recognizing the potential realities of something far less good. The utopianism that Barlow presented to the world was not -- as many assume -- him claiming these things were a sort of manifest destiny, but rather by presenting such a utopia, we might all strive and push and fight to actually achieve it.

Barlow was sometimes held up as a straw man for a kind of naive techno-utopianism that believed that the Internet could solve all of humanity's problems without causing any more. As someone who spent the past 27 years working with him at EFF, I can say that nothing could be further from the truth. Barlow knew that new technology could create and empower evil as much as it could create and empower good. He made a conscious decision to focus on the latter: "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.'”

Just yesterday, before I learned of Barlow's passing, we officially launched a new website, EveryoneCreates.org, which discusses just how ridiculous the myth -- pushed by the RIAA and MPAA and their friends -- that there's some sort of "war" between "content and tech." According to that narrative, the internet has done much to harm content creators. Yet, everywhere we look, we see the opposite. How content creators have been enabled by these technologies to create, to share, to distribute and, yes, to make money from their creations. Barlow was one of the first, if not the first, content creators from the "old" world, to wholeheartedly see the promise of the internet, and spent his life dedicated to making the internet such a powerful place for all of us content creators.

Either way, this is an end of an era. We're in an age now where the general narrative making the rounds is, once again, touching on the moral panic of how terrible everything in technology is. Barlow spent decades teaching us about the possibilities of a better world on the internet, and nudging us, sometimes gently, sometimes forcefully, in that direction. And, now, just at a point where that vision is most at risk, he's left us to continue that fight on our own. The internet world has many challenges ahead of it -- and we should all strive to be guided both by Barlow's principles and his vision of constantly pushing to mold the technology world into that world we want it to be -- not ignoring the negatives, but looking for ways to get beyond them and expand the opportunities for the good to come out. It will be harder without him being there to help guide us.

Filed Under: freedom, internet, internet freedom, john perry barlow, music
Companies: eff

Also Turning 20 Years Old Today: John Perry Barlow's Declaration Of The Independence Of Cyberspace

from the still-a-work-in-progress dept

Earlier today, we wrote about how 20 years ago today, the Communications Decency Act became law (most importantly, Section 230, rather than the rest of it, which was dropped as unconstitutional). Of course, at the time, everyone was mostly focused on the unconstitutional parts trying to outlaw lots of smut online. It was partly that signing (which itself was a part of the larger Telecommunications Reform Act that inspired an apparently fairly drunk John Perry Barlow to pen his now quite famous Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace -- which is now regularly quoted. A snippet:

Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of 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.

We have no elected government, nor are we likely to have one, so I address you with no greater authority than that with which liberty itself always speaks. I declare the global social space we are building to be naturally independent of the tyrannies you seek to impose on us. You have no moral right to rule us nor do you possess any methods of enforcement we have true reason to fear.

Governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. You have neither solicited nor received ours. We did not invite you. You do not know us, nor do you know our world. Cyberspace does not lie within your borders. Do not think that you can build it, as though it were a public construction project. You cannot. It is an act of nature and it grows itself through our collective actions.

Of course, many have attacked its words, and these days, it -- like Stewart Brand's famed "information wants to be free" quote (which is much longer and more nuanced than most people think) -- is more often referenced by people who hold it up for the sake of mockery, and to talk about how times have changed, or need to change.

And yet, there are (and remain) some very important concepts in that "dashed off" statement, and Barlow still stands by them today, even as think tanks laugh factories like ITIF (who brought you brilliant ideas like "SOPA") pretend he no longer supports it.

The Declaration was not a statement of inevitability, but rather a notice that things are different online. And they are. We've seen this over and over again -- from back then and continuously up through today. So many of the disputes that we run into are about this very different nature of the internet from the physical world. Borders are not easily marked online, though people have tried. Artificial property restrictions are make much less sense when there is no physical scarcity, but digital abundance allows for anyone to simply make their own copy. Questions about jurisdiction and power remain. Self-organizing communities continue to show up. Some work better than others. Some work for a time and fail. Other experiments show up to replace it.

And, yes, of course, there have been many attempts to either move existing laws into the internet world, or to craft new ones for that purpose. At the same time, many big corporations have stepped in as well, where their own terms of service often act as a type of constitution. Some of these work better than others. The little tiny good law tucked deep into the horrible law of the CDA, has actually been a key element in protecting much of what Barlow spoke about.

But, as Barlow notes today, it takes a lot of work to keep the system moving in the right direction, and it's something we cannot and should not take for granted:

Barlow admits that what he describes as the “immune system” of the Internet isn’t exactly automatic. It requires effort on the part of activists like himself. “It wasn’t a slam dunk and it isn’t now. I wouldn’t have started the EFF and the Freedom of the Press Foundation” if it were, he says. But he nonetheless believes that there is a kind of inexorable direction of the Internet’s political influence toward individual liberty.

The technology and innovation continues to make things possible, but what happens next, depends on what people do with it.

Filed Under: cda, cda 230, declaration of independence of cyberspace, internet rights, john perry barlow, jurisdiction

Interesting Ideas: Can You Peer Review The Entire Internet, Sentence By Sentence

from the more-truth,-less-FUD dept

One of the concerns many people have with the web is whether or not the content you come across is trustworthy. To be honest, to some extent I've always found this to be a feature, rather than a bug, in that it (hopefully) teaches people to be more skeptical of everything they read and to seek additional sources, opinions and viewpoints in determining what they really believe. However, it's definitely true that many people can get sucked in by less than credible information. There's an interesting project under way by some big names in the tech world, to try to create a product called Hypothes.is, which is described as:

An open-source, community-moderated, distributed platform for sentence-level annotation of the Web.

The goal being to allow people to "peer review" the web. The project is currently raising funds via Kickstarter to get a prototype together. There are definitely some interesting names involved with the project, including John Perry Barlow and Brewster Kahle. And, on top of that, I'm always in favor of anything that brings more truthfulness to discussions.

That said, I do wonder how useful or effective this will be. There have been a number of projects over the years that have tried to add annotation to the web. Over a decade ago, the one that had all the buzz was ThirdVoice. But no one used it. More recently, Google put forth a big effort with an annotation offering called SideWiki... and no one used it (leading Google to shut it down recently). There are still a bunch of other annotation systems, but it's not clear how much usage any of them really get.

So while I like the principles and the goal here, I'm curious as to how it's going to actually be made useful to the point that people find it worth using.

Filed Under: brewster kahle, hypothes.is, john perry barlow, open-source, peer review
Companies: google, kickstarter

John Perry Barlow Tells Copyright Maximalists That They've Got The Fundamentals Wrong

from the good-for-him dept

A bunch of folks have been submitting the story about how John Perry Barlow went to the e-G8 event and got to sit on a panel with some copyright maximalists, and explained to them how they are arguing about the wrong thing:

I may be one of very few people in this room who actually makes his living personally by creating what these gentlemen are pleased to call �intellectual property.� I don�t regard my expression as a form of property. Property is something that can be taken from me. If I don�t have it, somebody else does.

Expression is not like that. The notion that expression is like that is entirely a consequence of taking a system of expression and transporting it around, which was necessary before there was the internet, which has the capacity to do this infinitely at almost no cost.

He later added the key point, that everyone else who was on the panel weren't creators themselves, but were those who made their living off of creators, stating he wanted to focus on �incentivizing creativity by people who create things, and not large institutions who prey on them and have for years.�

Of course, this left his fellow panelists stumbling around a bit to defend their positions.

Jim Gianopulos of 20th Century Fox shot back that �no one�s going to argue against free speech,� if �free speech� means that someone takes a video camera and makes a movie on any subject he or she wants. But when �speech� is defined as sharing copyrighted works?

�Speech has to be free but movies cost money,� he said, adding that he hears plenty about the need for new business models but doesn�t see any actual alternative business models that generate the cash to fund big-budget films.

Culture Minister Fr�d�ric Mitterand took Barlow to task for his dramatic statements. �I do not share this apocalyptic vision of some dictatorship that will be creeping back through the internet into our lives to control our thoughts and the way in which we function,� he said. Some controls on the internet are eminently reasonable�we need �economic solutions to economic problems.�

The head of Universal Music France talked about just how much money was necessary to nurture new talent. DIdn�t Barlow understand economics?

Of course, Barlow understands economics much better than the others on the panel. The problem is that these guys seem to think that the only way to make money is through greater protectionism and treating content as property that needs an artificial scarcity. The whole point of what Barlow was saying was that this is simply not true. It's a fundamental assumption these guys are making that is false.

I actually see this all the time in these debates and it's immensely frustrating. When people like myself and others talk about why copyright is not that important, and that there are all sorts of other ways to make money, we're always hit back with the "but it costs money to make this stuff!" Those who suck off the teat of the old system are so fundamentally wedded to the idea that you must have copyright to make money that they entirely miss the fact that we are talking about ways to make money. Their brains simply default to "no copyright = no money," and thus, to them the argument "but these things cost money to make" makes sense. But that's only true if they don't hear what we say, and don't realize that we are talking about ways to make money -- just without relying on copyright to do so.

Kudos to Barlow for pointing much of this out -- though, it doesn't appear that his points sunk in.

On a separate note, the article points out that other digital thought leaders and activists urged Barlow not to go to the e-G8, because of concerns about how it was set up as a way for governments and companies to come together to regulate the internet to protect old business models and to stomp out speech they don't like.

I have to point out that I think it's silly, dangerous and wrong to suggest folks like Barlow should not participate in these sorts of meetings. If anything, it's better that he and others go and make their voices heard. Otherwise, these people don't hear the other viewpoints, and they assume -- falsely -- that they're right and that everyone agrees with them.

Filed Under: copyright, john perry barlow

A Look Back At Some Prescient Predictions On Copyright

from the they-knew-what-was-coming dept

Via Michael Scott, we are alerted to a blog post by Thomas O'Toole, where he looks at two separate papers from the pre-DMCA era, both presenting incredibly accurate predictions of what was about to happen in the world of copyright and content. The first, by John Perry Barlow hopefully many of you have read already. Written in 1992, The Economy of Ideas: Selling Wine Without Bottles on the Global Net recognizes exactly where things are heading, and the difficulty of selling content in a digital world. It also is quite accurate in recognizing the value of attention, and how that's a key scarce good.

The second paper is by Pamela Samuelson, and it discusses (again, quite accurately) the coming power grab by "copyright maximalists" via the DMCA, entitled The Copyright Grab. It clearly saw the intention of the DMCA to remove user rights, and grant highly questionable additional rights and powers to copyright holders in an online world. Samuelson lays out many concerns about where this is headed -- including how these proposals appear to trample certain fair use rights -- and in retrospect, her fears seem to have been backed up by history. Samuelson, by the way, has just written a new paper that is also worth reading pointing out how ridiculous current copyright statutory rates are -- an issue of key importance in the ongoing Tenebaum lawsuit, which (thankfully) the judge in the case is going to consider.

O'Toole's post about both of these papers is quite interesting, and he then points out a third paper, on which Samuelson based her paper. It outlines the copyright maximalists' plans for blocking the use of new technologies to share content -- including a segment on the importance of "education." O'Toole suggests that this education component never really happened, and that's why copyright infringement via file sharing is so common today. He argues that it's this lack of education that makes people think that file sharing does little to no harm.

While this might sound good on first pass, I'm not convinced that's really the case. The industry has been running an education campaign for years that has done nothing to slow down or stop file sharing. It's not that people aren't "educated." In fact, suggesting that is somewhat insulting. It's that people are educated enough to recognize that accessing/listening/watching/sharing content is a perfectly natural activity that, by itself, isn't doing any harm. Sure, when combined with a bad business model, it can do plenty of harm -- but more and more people intuitively recognize that the file sharing, by itself, is not the problem. The business model is the problem. So, no, it's not about "education." No education in the world is going to convince people that something they see as a square is really a circle.

Filed Under: copyright, john perry barlow, pam samuelson