JOHN PERRY BARLOW
It's a very safe bet that John Perry Barlow is the only former Republican county chairman in America who had a lucrative side business writing lyrics for the Grateful Dead. Now 53, Barlow spent 17...
...Who's crazy, Silicon Valley or the Republicans...
...It actually undermines mass marketing, which exists only because the masses have not defined themselves down to where you can be targeted for the things that you might actually like...
...Is this Luddism...
...Everyone says they're concerned about privacy, but just give them some forms, they'll fill them right in...
...I don't want to give it a name and I certainly don't want to give it a doctrine...
...BARLOW: Obviously it's both...
...The Internet, by putting the tools for disseminating information in everybody's hands, gives us the opportunity to create permanent liberty...
...BARLOW: I would be very surprised if that isn't happening right now...
...So there's been a co-evolutionary upward spiral of secrecy and privacy...
...What Yahoo did in France was to snap the manacles on themselves because it was in their institutional interest to do so...
...TAS: And the "Great Firewall" the Chinese government has built to try to keep the Net under control...
...TAS: You studied comparative religion...
...Information about people is information...
...TAS: So why the sudden interest...
...TAS: "2000 will be remembered as the year when government started to regulate cyberspace in earnest...
...BARLOW: The biggest Invisible Hand of all...
...Gore & Co...
...BARLOW: I don't see these things as being enforceable...
...They wouldn't be able to install technology that would make it possible to surveil the entire United States...
...BARLOW: My family were frontier people from the time they hit these shores in the 1600s until they ran slam, bang, up against the end of it in Wyoming at the turn of the last century I spent my youth in Pinedale, Wyoming—the only county seat in America without a traffic light— thinking that I had been cheated out of a frontier until I found that another one was forming...
...It's more important than any of the things that the United States government is focusing on...
...Mitch Kapor, founder of Lotus, and I started it in 1990, and we were 24 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR ¦ April 2001 joined shortly after by John Gilmore of Sun Microsystems and Steve Wozniak...
...To the extent that there will be political entities, we'll see the ascendance of city states like Singapore...
...They turn CDMA into product...
...TAS: So is someone like Doerr being irrational—or maybe cynical—or have the Republicans screwed up...
...But we also started to see coalitions forming on the other side, between what were considered in the media to be rabid right-wingers—Conrad Burns of Montana, for instance—and rabid left-wingers like Patrick Leahy...
...TAS: What about technological fixes, the various attempts at copy protection...
...are clearly authoritarians—authoritarians with good intentions, but authoritarians nonetheless...
...I had the director of the NSA publicly admit to me—we were sharing a stage last year— that the popular use of strong encryption was no longer a war that they were fighting...
...They get their product to reboot as quickly as possible, and keep on improving them...
...We really need to do this right...
...The problem is that if you can regulate child pornography, you can regulate anything...
...BARLOW: Copyright should stick to what it was originally designed to do, which is clearly stated in the preamble of the Copyright Act: protect expression as it is made tangible...
...That includes schools, parents, employers, Wall Street, the recording industry, the people who do television news...
...The nation states had its apotheosis in Auschwitz and the gulag and Hiroshima...
...It's a white elephant...
...They're generally former Marxist Utopians...
...BARLOW: Because it's a one-to-many system, just like all the industrial systems...
...And all of our albums, bad as many of them were, went platinum...
...BARLOW: I'm not sure they can—the costs are too high...
...If you can control that information you can control other kinds...
...TAS: But "universal freedom" only works as long as bad guys with guns don't show up at the door...
...AOL Time Warner...
...This was right after the Chinese had declared that all ISPs would have to register with the government, etc...
...And generally speaking, I think we are spared their tyranny by their incompetence...
...When you take information out of the container, you turn the old supply and demand equation on its head...
...My objective all along has been making universal the experience I've had, of being able to live in a decent place but still be part of the big world...
...BARLOW: It goes back to my belief that we have the opportunity now to create permanent liberty—my antennae go up any time I see expression being stifled or trapped or destroyed...
...A fellow at Harvard Law School's Berkman Center for the Internet and Society, Barlow is best known for his writing on the economics of information, summed up in a celebrated 1994 essay, Selling Wine Without Bottles: The Economy of Ideas...
...TAS: Your "cyberpeasantry...
...Technologically, the record companies and the publishing conglomerates are obsolete...
...As long as the rest of the world has sales and other taxes, why shouldn't the Internet...
...BARLOW: I think a lot of the current being a one-way flow where they made content and they sold it to the consumers who had no capacity to make content themselves...
...If you're not the kind of jurisdiction that is good for business, then business is going to go elsewhere...
...But look at what happened in India...
...So the FBI proposed a solution much more sweeping than even they understood...
...I fully expect a national sales tax to be one of the solutions the government turns to...
...BARLOW: When Clinton/Gore took over, we had just recently founded the Electronic Frontier Foundation...
...BARLOW: They're also an execution company...
...BARLOW: The most innovative developers "Miss Mulcahy, since these are the times that try men's souls, the Board and I have decided to take a three-hour lunch...
...From a purely technical point of view, if you have a mechanism to regulate any aspect of it, then you can regulate all of it...
...I have a long track record with this—I've been watching it for a long time, with Grateful Dead songs that I wrote quite a few years ago...
...TAS: Are we really going to be liberated from Disney...
...BARLOW: The Internet is a self-generative organism, powered by the desire of people to communicate and connect...
...TAS: That bill did pass...
...A friend of mine opened up the first big ISP [Internet Service Provider] in Beijing, a guy who's now one of Chinas few billionaires...
...No one has any illusions about it succeeding...
...It started out with data entry, and now there's a huge software industry...
...In both cases TV was driven by people who looked at information as on the left have even given you your own epithet—"free-range technolibertarian...
...On the Net you literally never can or will run out of space...
...We actually were able to help create more protection for people because for the first time we got a legal restraint on transactional data acquisition, like getting people's phone bills...
...Why are free downloads from Napster, copied off CDs, so different...
...If you're producing something that is good, there is no better way to create a market for your work than to let it self-replicate...
...Spectator contributing editor Spencer Reiss caught up with the peripatetic Barlow in Salt Lake City last month, on his way home to Pinedale, Wyoming...
...I think that it stays...
...TAS: Clinton, the FBI, and the NSA on the same side—there's one of your paradoxes...
...You had two ways that you could support broadcast media, advertising or the government...
...We had large, secretive and potentially malignant institutions watching things...
...BARLOW: They're not actually Luddites...
...You can't arrest 20 million college students for using Napster, no matter how unhappy that makes your big contributors in the music business...
...He said, "I don't think so...
...TAS: Well, someone's going to "civilize" cyberspace...
...Murdoch...
...Is that "family friendly...
...We won because we were right, we were reasonable, and we understood the technology...
...Put all of the works of Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera and 'N Sync under an unbreakable cryptographic lid...
...BARLOW: Electronic surveillance hasn't played a terribly significant role in solving most of the actual cases law enforcement deals with...
...TAS: Okay, but if you start peddling CDs of my song for half the price I charge, you're taking my money...
...What you're going to see is jurisdic-tional competition that looks like corporate competition—different jurisdictions are going to compete to be the seat of your business...
...It's not a whole lot compared with what local government does—or compared with what's happening in cyberspace...
...TAS: You called the '96 presidential election "a choice between cancers" mostly because of the cluelessness of both parties on Internet issues...
...TAS: One popular image of the Net is that it's a fantastic collection of thriving communities, where people who are dispersed geographically can meet, work together, make the world a better place...
...BARLOW: Personally I believe that there is some kind of Holy Who Knows out there...
...We always gave those songs away every time we played them...
...We won pretty much unequivocally...
...They should be wherever there are poor people who need access to a new economy...
...BARLOW: A watchdog for liberty in cyberspace...
...BARLOW: ...Finally got smart enough to realize that if they were serious about stopping crime they probably did not want large financial transactions, for instance, to be conducted with anything less than the best available security...
...His 1996 Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace managed simultaneously to outrage both high-tech collectivists and what he delights in calling The Powers That Were—corporate bureaucracies and government institutions rooted in the Industrial Age...
...BARLOW: One of the reasons I never use my AOL address—and I've had one since the very beginning—is because every time I open up that mailbox it is a putrid, steam26 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR ¦ April 2001 ing cesspool of solicitation for quadruple-X porn...
...He was the bete noire of the Clinton Administration's attempts to regulate the Internet, fighting the White JOHN PERRY BARLOW House on everything from the eavesdropping clipper chip to the brief-lived Communications Decency Act...
...BARLOW: Yeah...
...BARLOW: Because of Al Gore's great trum-petings we were delighted to be invited to the White House early on to hear what we thought would be the administration's agenda...
...TAS: Less and less...
...That's the kind of thing that makes a lot of people friendly...
...There's a place for cyberpeasantry, for a while anyway...
...TAS: Rock stars and magazine publishers still need to make a living...
...When you take my horse I can't ride it anymore...
...And I don't see how a government, national or otherwise, can apply taxes to the Internet that don't in some way extend beyond their domains...
...They'd be perfectly protected and so would the human heritage from ever having to listen to them...
...More important, there is always a tradeoff between freedom of expression and privacy...
...TAS: The Net has the odd quality of turning sleepy backwaters of the law into urgent political issues...
...And every time it changes in some fundamental way then the whole thing becomes a frontier all over again, because that calls into question all of the practices that have preceded it...
...The next step is what Bruce Sterling called an "island in the Net"—in effect, a data haven...
...BARLOW: I don't know...
...Cyberspace puts an enormous amount of power in the hands of individuals...
...BARLOW: If you can create an environment where anybody anywhere can say whatever they please, and nobody can stop them, then you have essentially solved the problem of tyranny...
...I said, you're in the middle of Beijing...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR: There's been a lot of hand-wringing in the GOP about Silicon Valley going to the Democrats, despite being a "natural" Republican constituency—pro-enterprise, pro-free market, anti-intervention...
...But I've always believed that the best way to ensure liberty is to exercise it...
...And the spiritual-music industry doesn't recognize Mormons as Christians...
...We've seen where that leads...
...That's from the Economist last month, talking about individuals are going to be as readily amenable to that kind of pressure...
...TAS: So in other words, we'll see NaziMemorabilia.com, with no assets or operations in France, on a server in the Bahamas, etc...
...TAS: Famous last words...
...BARLOW: There isn't a great deal going on that's more important than laying the foundations of the place where practically all commerce—whether social, economic, or political—will be conducted for the next couple of thousand years...
...TAS: There are more than a few people who for a variety of reasons find this entire vision highly disagreeable...
...And when they set about trying to catch the guys who did it, it was just plain old detective work—they happened to find the differential of the Ryder Rent-a-Truck, which had a serial number on it...
...I don't see any solution to that outside of introducing information economy into those areas...
...TAS: You have proclaimed television a doomed industrial artifact...
...BARLOW: I'll go with that...
...Critics "One of the reasons Americans have jumped with both feet onto the Net is that it realty is a new frontier...
...BARLOW: I think the opportunities that are afforded by the possibility of universal freedom are going to be sufficiently persuasive so that people are going to rise up and keep themselves free, with the tools that are available online...
...You can't tax what you can't see...
...Is the Net so important that you would put it at the center of the political debate...
...TAS: But you're in favor of copy-protection for CDs, but not digital files—doesn't that help support those nasty old record companies while leaving, say, an independent artist out in the cold, who could otherwise be selling his work on the Net through paid downloads...
...They didn't really know much at all...
...BARLOW: Well, I'd say that to the extent that they start becoming a patent-owning company, you will see that they are less and less creative...
...But there are lots of people working on that...
...I asked him if he'd registered with the government, and he hadn't...
...It's more important than fighting terrorism or continuing to lose the war on some drugs...
...Anybody who could come up with the phrase "information superhighway" doesn't understand what the Internet is...
...Instead of having a relationship between scarcity and value, there's a relationship between familiarity and value—the more widely distributed a work is, the better known and admired the source of that work becomes...
...They didn't have one...
...CYBERSPAC JOHN PERRY BARLOW WANTS YOU TO RETHINK A FEW THINGS FOR THE DIGITAL AGE...
...TAS: There's a standard criticism of you— and George Gilder, for that matter: crazy optimist...
...Gore's metaphor turns the Net into a massive, centrally administered and planned government project, which it isn't...
...real challenges to their authority...
...No one planned it...
...We can all be cowboys again...
...If content is in those containers, like CDs, then I think copyright goes on applying to them perfectly well, and should...
...Whether it was the FBI and CIA or the management of your corporation, we felt that as long as we didn't know what was going on inside them, it wasn't a good thing for them to know what was going on inside us...
...We can all be cowboys again...
...And in an economy that consists entirely of things that look like speech, any effort to restrain freedom of expression is simultaneously an effort to restrain freedom of commerce...
...Other nation state...
...But underlying that is a notion that has profound political consequences: that the Net is our best hope for achieving universal liberty and freedom...
...BARLOW: Child pornography is a wonderful stalking horse for a whole raft of truly malign regulations...
...In 1990 he co-founded the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the oldest and best-known organization dedicated to preserving and expanding freedom in the digital domain...
...TAS: For readers who always skip the introduction to the interview, what is EFF...
...BARLOW: There are better ways to make a living than owning things...
...BARLOW: I agree...
...TAS: What's so wrong with "information superhighway...
...Al Gore not only didn't invent the Internet, he doesn't understand it...
...it just changes its flavor profoundly...
...BARLOW: The FBI realized that with the advent of digital circuits, it wasn't going to be quite so easy to clip a pair of alligator clips onto somebody's phone line Al Gore not only didn't invent the and lie out in the shrubbery to hear what was going on in there...
...TAS: The FBI...
...TAS: Arguably, one of the reasons Americans have jumped with both feet onto the Net is that it really is a new frontier...
...Police...
...Now 53, Barlow spent 17 years struggling to save his family's Wyoming cattle ranch before lighting out for cyberspace—a term coined by science fiction writer William Gibson that Barlow is widely credited with popularizing...
...As we found out on cryptography, we're still going to have to fight...
...BARLOW: It's not an indicator of anything, other than that someone introduced them, they're friends...
...The best thing that can happen to you if you're good is to let people know that you're good...
...They actually had some THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR ¦ April 2001 25 of the parties involved under wiretap...
...And then the so-called "clipper chip" would have given the key to everyone's encryption system to the government.You would be allowed to encrypt only if you gave the government the key...
...The better known your work, the more likely people are to pay you for more of it...
...The nation state is the most exposed, because it's the most removed from most peoples actual lives.You have to ask yourself, what does the nation state do that most people want...
...But I feel very comfortable that it exists, and that it has the capacity to affect the course of people's lives in a fairly granular way...
...Barlow is the preeminent voice for what he is not shy about calling high-tech libertarians...
...And the more valuable that source becomes, the more valuable is the work that person will do in the future...
...You want to abolish copyright on the Net...
...I'm not going to mourn its passage...
...Kallstrom's a great guy—one of the few people in the FBI that really got it...
...Those who have had power are going to have to earn it all over again...
...New York and London are actually far more important than most countries...
...Look at the World Trade Center bombing...
...When television moves to the Net, suddenly there are other ways to pay for it than mass-market advertising...
...And also we made it so that in order for them to put in a wiretap, they had to go through the same judicial stuff that they've gone through in the past on a local basis...
...In any event, the Net's would-be tax collectors are going to have a hard time of it, partly for technical reasons and partly because the issue is being raised at the same time that they have an increasingly difficult time convincing their citizens there is a reason for taxes of all kinds, national level in particular...
...Remember, in cyberspace, a city state is a global entity...
...BARLOW: Defense against what...
...And let's not forget: Gore was widely assumed to be the next president of the United States...
...Both are evil, but one of them is a lot more boring in its evil than the other...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR ¦ April 2001 29...
...Despite the important contributions of government research programs, the Net as we know it today has been built from the edges, not the center...
...And governments...
...BARLOW: I think that there is mounting evidence that the free electronic distribution of the contents of material from those commercial objects—the songs off the CD—does not reduce the sala-bility of the CD...
...TAS: Speaking of threats to the Net's health, how about taxation...
...Outside of your mother's Social Security, what does it do that you'd be willing to pay for...
...TAS: So what replaces it...
...So-called intellectual property is very different from real property...
...In any condition where I've got to make a choice between privacy and freedom of expression, I'm going to go with freedom of expression...
...James Kallstrom, the former assistant director of the FBI, is now on the board of one of the companies working to cre- ate anonymous electronic transactions...
...TAS: So John Doerr—the famed venture capitalist, a lifelong Republican—out campaigning for Al Gore in the last election is not a leading indicator...
...BARLOW: I don't worry about China— what they're creating is the appearance of a great firewall...
...TAS: The really big invisible hand...
...The United States has just endorsed the Council of Europe's Cybercrimes Treaty, which includes laws against Internet fraud and child pornography...
...There are an awful lot of minds out there in the sticks globally that are perfectly capable of doing a lot of the work that is necessary to turn data into information...
...A friend of mine once declared that I was a "pronoid": somebody who believes that the universe is a conspiracy on our behalf...
...They could only surveil from the switch...
...Silicon Valley remains an untapped opportunity for the Republican party, and it would be unwise to write them off as having "fallen" to the Democrats...
...BARLOW: We re in the middle of a thorough renegotiation of every power relationship on the planet...
...Right now, because just about all cyber transactions use a credit card, it's not very easy to have anonymous exchange...
...There is no difference in cyberspace between freedom of commerce and freedom of expression...
...TAS: Is there a right of privacy...
...aren't you afraid you're going to get into trouble with the government...
...TAS: The French recently managed to stop Yahoo's auctions of Nazi memorabilia...
...THE NATION STATE...
...Half the politburo has accounts on my system...
...Servers in Canada or the Bahamas are only the tip of the iceberg...
...BARLOW: Republicans are naturally paranoid, and they always assume that things are going badly for them, no matter what...
...The more inclined an organization is to live on the fruits of its patent, the less inclined it is to be creative...
...It is political, but neither of the parties capture Silicon Valley's politics in any succinct way...
...But if you take my song I can still sing it, and the fact that both of us now know my song does not lessen its value...
...northern hemispheric zest for privacy is a consequence of the Cold War, and the social patterns that came out of that...
...No matter how much they try to dress up these issues as being about "the rights of the artists" or "rewarding creativity," what is happening now is a war between institutions—who hold most of the copyrights—and individuals trying to wrest control over creative processes from institutional hands...
...TAS: Surely the nation state has some uses...
...BARLOW: The Democrats made a big play for Silicon Valley, but the irony is that in doing so they demonstrated how little they understand it...
...TAS: Privacy—there's a temptation to say, who cares...
...And to give the government credit, once we got them to understand what they were actually asking for, they did back away...
...What surprises me is that you, an artist and songwriter, side with Napster...
...But we did have the advantage of mutually assured destruction, which is to say that if somebody took their knowledge of my peccadilloes and used them against me, I could turn that one around because I knew theirs as well...
...Cyberspace is seamless...
...BARLOW: Precisely...
...From golden goose to sacred cow—it's not all that far a distance...
...BARLOW: It would not have been recognized by the people who wrote the Constitution, who grew up with exactly as much privacy as I grew up with in my little town in Wyoming—I never had any and neither did anybody else...
...They realized that their fix to the technology problem was going to give them far more sweeping power than they actually wanted...
...TAS: You are known for a fairly, well, Utopian vision about where the Net is taking us—"universal freedom," the decline of the "nation state," the rise of "virtual communities...
...AND THE FUTURE OF LIBERTY...
...And what they were doing on electronic issues was being driven by events like the World Trade Center bombing, which had inflamed concerns the government was losing the ability to wiretap...
...Period...
...BARLOW: But only after it had been thoroughly modified in negotiation with us...
...BARLOW: Pick a country in Africa—you could have people scanning in books, and then correcting all the mistakes that the optical character readers make...
...TAS: Encryption sounds pretty useful to someone like, say, Osama bin Laden...
...COPYRIGHT, FOR ONE...
...Look at the economic advantage that adheres to being an old-fashioned "tax haven...
...Why will governments refrain from violently suppressing any international treaties on everything from "intellectual property," to cross-border Internet commerce, to tax havens...
...BARLOW: They're enforceable to the extent that institutions love other institutions...
...BARLOW: I think it's inappropriate to try to tax beyond one's own jurisdiction...
...I think that is likely to be taken apart by the Internet, because just as individuals are more transparent now, so are institutions...
...BARLOW: I think that we will look back at AOL Time Warner and shake our heads at the marvel that we ever took it as seriously as we do today...
...It may actually increase it...
...TAS: Well, Qualcomm would argue...
...But I think that people are going to resist it...
...TAS: What about computer software...
...BARLOW: Sure...
...There's nothing that irritates someone whose Utopia has failed more than the presence of someone whose Utopia hasn't failed yet...
...TAS: Which leads to the decline of the nation state, how...
...He continues today as EFF's vice chairman...
...And he'll happily tell you that his interests as a songwriter are far better served by Napster, because he doesn't have a channel for his work in the conventional music industry, because he THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR ¦ April 2001 27 writes Mormon songs...
...The idea that fame and fortune are connected has never been more true...
...TAS: From a utilitarian point of view, giving up some information about yourself clearly has some rewards...
...And it's highly unlikely that "If you can create an environment where anybody anywhere can say whatever they please, and nobody can stop them, then you have essentially solved the problem of tyranny...
...So they're looking to the government to save them by giving them an even stronger grip on the content itself...
...BARLOW: Markets and multinational corporations are likely to take up many of the functions of government—setting standards, determining the value of currencies, taking care of the workforce...
...Here's a great example for Spectator readers: Orrin Hatch—I don't know how many people know this, but he's a songwriter who moonlights as a senator...
...Should the digital sweatshops be in Africa, or in Virginia...
...Silicon Valley has not "gone" to either party, because politically it's non-partisan...
...TAS: Okay, you were saying about Clinton and Gore...
...Defense...
...But there is another image of it as dystopic and unhealthy—weird people lurking anonymously, perverts, criminals, mad bombers, an alienated and alienating place...
...Look at Napster, which has put copyright law, of all things, on the front page...
...One of my biggest agenda items is trying to make it possible for the 28 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR ¦ April 2001 seventy percent of Africa that still lives in rural areas to stay there, and not be driven into the cities...
...TAS: There's a push on to get around the jurisdiction problem by "harmonizing" laws internationally...
...place their faith in execution, not legal protection...
...I don't expect television to go away...
...TAS: How...
...Look at AOL...
...TAS: Who or what is leading that conspiracy...
...It would have made it possible for them to sit in an office in DC and listen in on any phone in the United States...
...TAS: But at first you had high hopes for Clinton and Gore...
Vol. 34 • April 2001 • No. 3
