Frontiersman of the Internet: John Perry Barlow
He may have been a lyricist for the Grateful Dead, but a component of John Perry Barlow’s activism and corpus will forever be associated with a concept fast losing its gloss: internet freedom.
“A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace” had a certain founding father’s imperative, and, along with that added enthusiasm, a degree of misunderstanding. Like the mind expansion experiences he shared with Timothy Leary during the 1960s, it had a psychedelic edge to it, an LSD doctrine of interactive space.