IsayUsaySsay

Name   : Addie Schulte
Time   : 
Subject: Interview with John Perry Barlow
Date   :

Interview with John Perry Barlow

The only way to avoid to be a part of the establishment
is to be a failure.
                                      John Perry Barlow
           Vice Chairman Electronic Frontier Foundation

In 1990, when we founded the EFF the levels of confusion and indifference were daunting. Now, the level of indifference is lower, but the level of confusion is higher. Frankly, in 1990 I was hoping to reduce the level of indifference, but at this point I tend look at this indifference as a great blessing. Because what has replaced that indifference is an increasing hysteria on the part of traditional powers, manifestating itself as a legal response to the Net in all kinds of damaging ways. I'm enough of a Net enthousiast to think that we have got an inevitable process on our side, but I'm also concerned that in their efforts to defend themselves against the Net, the traditional governments and institutions of the industrial period are going to be able to bring back fear into the culture of the Net. People will start to self-regulate and fear to express themselves freely long after it is necessary. The governments are really figuring out a way to control this and they all got an excuse. Whether it is child pornography, nuclear terrorism or neo-nazism, you name it.

The Net is designed to deal with such censorship as would be enacted by a nuclear war. Legalisators are not going to be a major problem. Ultimately I think we can win.

The Net is one of the most significant developments in the history of mankind. And we are concerned about child pornography. I don't think it is a good thing, but it is utterly trivial.

If you go on the Net, you can still see the flavour, the libertarian, anarchistic attitude that was there when there were only a couple of hunderd or thousand people, but now it's over a hunderd million.
The great thing about the Net is that on the Net the CIA is exactly the same size as the Symbionese Liberation Army. I've done a lot to get companies on the Net, because the best way we can make certain that this thing survives is for them to think of it as a place to make some money, instead of some kind of hippie-free-for-all.

I do not think of the Net as a medium, but as a space, an environment. Most medium is one-direction, almost all of them are non-conversational. This is different, this is like what is going on between us now, with potententially everybody in the human race.

This will sound lunatic, hyperbolic, but I really think it is not out of the question that every synapse on this planet will be continually connected to every other synapse, sometime in the next 500 years, as a result of this medium splitting out and becoming the nervous tissue of the world. Then there is an ecology of the mind, a collective organism of thought. A place where it lives. That will be very powerful.

The most significant thing the EFF achieved is setting out a few important metaphors. To the best of my knowledge I was the first to apply the word cyberspace to something that already existed. Until that time nobody ever thought of it as a place or a space or an environment at all. We dealt with it as we dealt with the telecommunications network. That was important to create a self awareness for the people that were on the Net at an early stage. We convinced the law enforcement of the United States to behave in a more considered way. I think we can take credit for that. We achieved a lot before they knew was something going on, now that they know there is something going on, it is much, much harder.

The EFF is certainly treated as though we are a part of the establishment. We take crap in the way that one does when one is a part of the establishment from some of our erstwhile friends. We are now the bad guys. There was an article in Wired which basically called us 'patsies for the FBI'. I still think that we constitute a fairly decent rapid deployment force along the border between cyberspace and the fysical world. Incursions into cyberspace by usually clueless forces from the physical world are likely to meet us. So far we have been pretty good at repelling them.
Success inevitably breeds establishment. The only way to avoid to be a part of the establishment is to be a failure.

On this conference there is an awful lot of that video- guerilla culture that never quite pulled of the media- revolution it was planning in the sixties and early seventies and is still trying to make that happen. They're resisting the Net because it does not follow their paradigm.

The Internet is ultimately going to eliminate the nation- state. Everything is going to be local and global. I see the renaissance of the city-state.
The nation-state belongs to the industrial period and it will go away with the industrial period. It is exactly the wrong layer for the information environment. As information media are becoming denser and denser, you got to much information at that level to sort in a meaningful way. Try to have with a conversation with a United States Congressman now. It will be a frustating experience because they have the attention span of a fieldmouse. They are so bombarded with information that they are in datashock.
Addie Schulte