In a Q&A on the Reddit conferencing system, he wrote: “I’m willing to accept it when someone calls me a good man. He also worked to bring the internet to Africa, to promote biofuels in India, to clear mines in Vietnam and to legalise marijuana in the US, among other things. He had already co-founded in 1990 the Electronic Frontier Foundation, to fight governments in the courts, and he added the Freedom of the Press Foundation in 2012.

In reality, Barlow used his fame to help others. The declaration’s huge success fitted Barlow’s belief in pronoia, which is the opposite of paranoia: it is the feeling that the world is secretly conspiring to help you. Some people criticised it for being naive, but its idealism was inspiring. It was a response to the arrogance and (digital) ignor- ance of the world’s leaders, and to President Bill Clinton’s foolish Communications Decency Act, which tried to ban offensive material online.īarlow “zapped it off to email list” – the hundreds of people who followed his public life – and it rapidly spread across the web like a rash. He wrote it one night at the World Economic Forum in Davos in 1996, between bouts of drinking and dancing. This insight is the basis of “viral marketing”, and many of today’s free online services are based on it.īarlow benefited from this viral effect, in that he is most commonly remembered – at least, outside the fraternity of Deadheads – for his sonorous, Jeffersonian paper A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace. Having worked with the Grateful Dead, Barlow was one of the first to understand that, in an information economy, value is driven not by scarcity but by familiarity.

Macintosh roms. john perry barlow