Re: <nettime> John Perry Barlow R.I.P.

[Douglas Rushkoff <rushkoff@rushkoff.com>]

Oh shoot. 

For what itâ??s worth, Barlow lived more in most days than the majority of people live in a year or a lifetime. 

He was *finally* working on the book that Penguin contracted him to write back in the late 1980â??s about the emerging culture of cyberspace. I sure hope he got enough done for it to be edited and published. 

I always felt like his Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace misrepresented his real thinking about the relationship of law, order, business, and cyber culture. Yes, it had a libertarian, anti-government stance. But that was a very anti-government moment, as far as the net was concerned. They were arresting hackers (Operation SunDevil) and censoring content (Computer Decency Act). Of course, by working to make the net a government-free zone, this approach just opened it to the corporations who poured in. But I think it was hard to see that coming, particularly for the early libertarians of the net, who thought small and local business would be favored in such a seemingly a bottom-up, decentralized environment. 



----------

Douglas Rushkoff
http://rushkoff.com <http://rushkoff.com/>
â?¢Founder, Laboratory for Digital Humanism
â?¢Professor of Media Theory and Digital Economics, CUNY/Queens
â?¢Fellow, Institute for the Future

Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus <https://www.indiebound.org/book/9781617230172> my new book on what went wrong in the digital economy and how to fix it.
Team Human <http://teamhuman.fm/> - my weekly podcast promoting human intervention in the machine

Sign up for RushkoffMail <http://www.rushkoff.com/subscribe/> to get updates and newest writing

> On Feb 8, 2018, at 5:59 AM, Patrice Riemens <patrice@xs4all.nl> wrote:
> 
> 
> (bwo Barbara Strebel)
> 
> https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/02/john-perry-barlow-internet-pioneer-1947-2018
> 



#  distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission
#  <nettime>  is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
#  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
#  more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
#  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@kein.org
#  @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject: