Valued Commentator and recent newlywed Buck Mulligan brings to our attention this possibly-true fact from John Perry Barlow’s autobiography, which–and I’m gonna be completely honest with you here–has blasted my mind straight out of my asshole.
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Tag: John Perry Barlow (Page 1 of 3)
I forgot to include this when I wrote about Barlow’s book: a wonderful article from The Baffler about the Electronic Frontier Foundation. As it turns out–and you’ll be astonished to find this out–the group was, is, and will be completely full of shit. Guess who pays the bills? Give you a hint: it rhymes with “Apple and Facebook and a bunch of other assholes who couldn’t give two fucks about civil liberties as long as Silicon Valley is allowed to do whatever it wants whenever it wants.”
But we shouldn’t be surprised, should we? The organization got its start defending thievesOOPS I meant hackers who had broken into someone else’s propertyOOPS hacked into the mainframe and stoleOOPS liberated another person’s work. If they had jimmied open a window and snatched a file, then that would be illegal and wrong, but since they got in via modem…freedom fighters?
But, hey: information wants to be free and that’s why shoplifting books is legal. Case closed and all hail Eris.
I’m not reviewing Mother American Night. If you want to read a thoughtful analysis of the book, try Chris Jennings’ take in the Wall Street Journal or Jesse Jarnow’s piece in Wired. They got paid to ruminate on this tissue-thin memoir, but Hatchette didn’t even send me a free book, so fuck it. As you might imagine from the venues of their reviews, Chris concentrates on JPB’s politics, which were so shallow it took him a decade to realize Dick Cheney was a fucking monster, and Jesse on his connection to the computer machines, which JPB loved almost as much as when the makers of the computer machines paid him to give speeches and go to parties.
So I won’t talk about those topics, instead relating to you the rhythm of the book. The first half is a series of Mentos commercials.
- John Perry Barlow finds himself in a wacky and slightly dangerous situation.
- Through verve and pluck, JPB extricates himself from said situation, often tossing a witty bon mot over his denim-clad shoulder as he exits.
- The authority figure in the story chuckles, shakes his head, waggles his finger.
- Repeat.
The second half is a lip-chapping selfsuck about the EFF, the Electronic Finger Fuckers or whatever that stands for, which is a grassroots lobbying group started by Barlow to protect the rights of internet users. You remember the manifesto:
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.
That’s the Declaration of Cybertronian Independence or whatnot, and the version you know has been bowdlerized. That quote you just read? Originally, it was longer.
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. Leave us to be digitized, monetized, and collateralized by our non-elected betters. The internet industry, unlike every other known to man since time immemorial, will morally and righteously police itself without governmental interference and you can’t tax us, either. I called it. No taxes on the internet, that’s a thing now because I put it in my manifesto.
Upon learning of the edit, John Perry Barlow fired his pistols indoors and stormed off to Gstaad to ski with Jackie Onassis.
So, anyhoo, read it or don’t. But now I don’t have to feel guilty about not writing about it.
Listen: God bless John Perry Barlow, and let’s celebrate his life, but holy shit never say “meatspace.”
Starts at 8 o’clock Eastern time.
You may make Hologram JPB. He would think it was funny.
- Immediate gratification is your right as a child of God.
- Always have a scapegoat in mind.
- If they’re not trying to get you now, they soon will be; beat them to the punch.
- Beat them; punch them.
- Don’t think about money, just make it.
- Defenestrate ambidextrists.
- Moralize about others; rationalize about yourself.
- Steal dogs.
- If you can learn to forgive yourself, you’ll never need to apologize.
- Yell at facts if they won’t do what you want.
- Wait for inspiration.
- In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man can get away with anything (as long as he’s quiet).
- There’s an enormous spectrum in between the absolute truth and an utter lie, and you have to find out where you’re comfortable residing within that spectrum.
- Question motives.
- Suspect allegiances.
- Good manners can be a weapon.
- People love it when you give them nicknames.
- Demand credit for changing your mind.
- There are many in the world with problems far greater than your own, but fuck them.
- Transcend humility.
- Remember that money fixes everything.
- Feign dignity.
- Live like Bono’s watching.
- Pretend you’re a wizard sometimes.
- Insist.
The handsome guy in the middle was John Fitzgerald Kennedy, Jr., and he would have been looking at his 60th birthday were he alive. Probably would have been president, if he hadn’t driven off any bridges. When he was a teenager, he was a little asshole, so his mother sent him out to the Bar-Cross Ranch for the summer. Just like another teenage asshole we know. Sometimes, boys need some coaching up. Barlow put ’em all to work. Always work to do on the ranch.
The blonde was his wife, Carolyn Besette-Kennedy. She was in the airplane that Junior didn’t quite know how to fly.
If you told John Perry Barlow that famous people were talking about computers, he would say to you, “Let me get my neckerchief.”
Regardless of its Swiss birth, LSD is an American drug, which means there is an East Coast history and a West Coast history.
Timothy Leary was a psychologist and teacher at Harvard. He and a man named Richard Alpert had access to psychedelics and a house so fancy it had a name. The men were academics, so they started an academic journal. They wrote at length about the soul. There were retreats. Meditation. O, the lectures. They took their psychedelics pseriously. Richard Alpert, who was from Newton, Massachusetts, even adopted a Holy Foreign Name, which is the ultimate White Guy On Acid move.
Out West, a redneck novelist stole a shitload of Goofy Juice from the CIA and bought a school bus, which he and his friends used to bother people all across the country. There were no retreats on the West Coast; the West Coast went furthur. There were parties, where famous journalists were lied to, and there was a house band.
Everybody got busted just the same, though.
John Perry Barlow knew Bill S. Preston, Esquire.
(Before anyone starts piping up in the Comment Section about one of the randos is a famous tech billionaire: I don’t care. Fuck all of ’em.)
Hey, don’t judge: I’m sure some of your friends have committed treason, too.
This one, you may judge. You may judge the shit out of this bullshit.
The white-haired fellow on the left is Daniel Ellsberg. Nixon tried to have him assassinated a few times, but Nixon tried to have everyone assassinated a few times. The guy next to JPB is Joan Cusack’s brother.
Listen, this is gonna come out racist, but I don’t give a shit: is that woman wearing native garb? And if so: did Santana force her to?
“Put on your native garb.”
“I was just gonna wear my jeans, Carl–”
SLAPITO!
“Never deny Santana!”
And so on.
All the computer nerds and freedom fetishists have tried to claim Barlow today, but fuck ’em. He’s ours. He was ours first.
ONE
He died in his sleep, because men who live morally get to die in their sleep.
That’s not true at all.
TWO
John Perry Barlow was born in 1947, to Mormons. The West is full of Mormons, and Wyoming is in the West, and the Bar Cross Ranch is in Wyoming. You grow things on a farm, but you raise things on a ranch. The Barlows raised cattle. John Perry Barlow was a cowboy. He was first educated in a one-room schoolhouse, because you cannot tell a cowboy story without a one-room schoolhouse, and then his parents sent him off to a prep school in Colorado. There, he met a skinny kid named Bobby.
THREE
My father went that way, too. Sick, sick, sick, and then he woke up dead, having been no better or worse the night before.
I wonder if it happens during a dream.
FOUR
The skinny kid, Bobby, comes out to the Bar Cross Ranch to spend the summer of 1963. He and Barlow ride horses, punch doggies, there are rope tricks involved. It’s the single most important summer in Bobby’s life; part of him is still there.
FIVE
John Perry Barlow wrote this, while drunk at a party in Switzerland, in 1996:
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.
The Governments of the Industrial World, upon reading John Perry Barlow’s words, chuckled and said, “You’re adorable,” and sent the Secret Police to computer classes.
Those are the opening lines to A Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace. Takes balls to write a Declaration, plus a certain social status. If you write a Declaration in a shack in the woods, then everyone’s going to call it a Manifesto.
SIX
The boy shows promise. Wesleyan, where he studies Comparative Religion and writes poetry and serves two terms as Student Body President. Spends his weekends sitting cross-legged in mansions with Tim Leary. Accepted to Harvard Law, and wins a book contract based on a few chapters of a novel. Turns down Harvard, takes the advance, fucks off to India, never turns in the book.
SEVEN
The doctors can keep you alive if you are willing to let them hurt you.
EIGHT
It is 1971. John Perry Barlow, who was born and raised in the West, in Wyoming, is living in New York City. He is dealing cocaine. He is shooting cocaine. He is armed, and almost certainly wearing his cowboy hat. The skinny kid from the ranch has joined a band, and they are playing right outside the city in Port Chester, at the Capitol Theater. No one in the band could write lyrics, at least not well, and so they had given the job to a poet the guitarist knew. At first, the arrangement worked, but then the skinny kid started coming up with songs and needed words, but he and the poet didn’t get along. The skinny kid and the poet had an argument backstage at one of the shows, and then the poet turned to the coke dealer in the cowboy hat, who’d been hanging around all week getting on everyone’s nerves, and said,
“You wrote poetry in college, right?”
John Perry Barlow said that he had.
“Great. He’s yours.”
And he was.
NINE
He was engaged to a woman named Cynthia Horner, who died in her sleep, too. She was 29, and on an airplane. Some people are born with broken hearts.
TEN
In 1972, John Perry Barlow went back to the ranch. His father was dying. He had been to Wesleyan, and Millbrook, and India and Europe and Africa, and New York City. Hollywood, too, but he went back to the West, back to Wyoming and the Bar-Cross Ranch, and that’s where he stayed for a good long while. Don’t get me wrong: JPB would jet off to Paris to hang out with Jackie Onassis on the weekends, but he spent most of his time punching them doggies.
ELEVEN
That the internet is a space ungovernable by fleshy authority, where one is guaranteed both inviolable anonymity and absolute freedom of speech, is not axiomatic. It is not mathematical. It’s precisely the view of the internet you might expect from a Wyoming rancher who identified politically–depending on who was asking–as Republican, libertarian, or anarchist.
I wonder what independence in cyberspace would have looked like to a city-dwelling socialist.
TWELVE
Well past the age when he should have known better, Barlow liked to punctuate his arguments by firing his pistol into the air (if he were outside) or into the floorboards (if he were inside). He still got invited to parties.
THIRTEEN
It would be a finer world had he been right about the internet.
FOURTEEN
There’s a band out on the highway. Everybody’s dancing.
John Perry Barlow died today.
And THE LORD created man, and when He was done, man worshiped and made thanks and had several questions.
“Do we have speed?”
THE LORD said that man did not.
“Are we strong?”
THE LORD said that man was not.
“Where are our claws?”
THE LORD’s head is the size of America, and His shoulders are each like oceans. He shrugged them and said,
“No claws. I gave you thumbs, though.”
Man answered,
“You gave them to gorillas, too.”
THE LORD said,
“So I did. So I did.”
And man did list off so many useful traits to be born with: eyesight like a hawk, or a nose like a bloodhound; skin like a rhino, or skin like a cuttlefish; venom like a snake, or poison like a frog.
THE LORD shrugged His shoulders once more.
And man said,
“Then what have You given us?”
THE LORD said,
“Each other.”
And then He took no further questions.
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