John Perry Barlow Quotes & Sayings

It didn't matter what we did or where we did it as long as we were together. We knew we'd found what most people either pursue in years of futile search or dismiss as a fantasy at the outset: the missing half of ourselves. The real thing. — John Perry Barlow

information is simultaneously a relationship,
an action, and an area of shared mind. What it isn't is a noun.
Information is not a thing. It isn't an object. It isn't something that,
when you sell it or have it stolen, ceases to remain in your possession. It
doesn't have a market value that can be objectively determined. — John Perry Barlow

We will create a civilization of the Mind in Cyberspace. May it be more humane and fair than the world your governments have made before. — John Perry Barlow

The real issue is control. The Internet is too widespread to be easily dominated by any single government. By creating a seamless global economic zone, anti-sovereign and unregulatable, the Internet calls into question the very idea of a nation-state. — John Perry Barlow

Humanity seems bent on creating a world economy primarily based on goods that take no material form. In doing so, we may be eliminating any predictable connection between creators and a fair reward for the utility others may find in their works. — John Perry Barlow

Imagine discovering a continent so vast that it may have no end to its dimensions. Imagine a new world with more resources than all our future greed might exhaust, more opportunities than there will ever be entrepreneurs enough to exploit, and a peculiar kind of real estate that expands with development. Imagine a place where trespassers leave no footprints, where goods can be stolen infinite number of times and yet remain in the possession of their original owners, where business you never heard of can own the history of your personal affairs ... — John Perry Barlow

Our identities have no bodies, so, unlike you, we cannot obtain order by physical coercion. We believe that from ethics, enlightened self-interest, and the commonweal, our governance will emerge. — John Perry Barlow

The first serious infowar is now engaged. The field of battle is WikiLeaks. You are the troops. — John Perry Barlow

They seem to have forgotten that, and are back saying the only purpose of P2P networks is for illegal trading of owned goods. We claim part of the reason for P2P is for legal trading of what ought to be in public domain. And what is in public domain in many cases. — John Perry Barlow

Royalties are not how most writers or musicians make their living. Musicians by and large make a living with a relationship with an audience that is economically harnessed through performance and ticket sales. — John Perry Barlow

One can imagine the government's problem. This is all pretty magical stuff to them. If I were trying to terminate the operations of a witch coven, I'd probably seize everything in sight. How would I tell the ordinary household brooms from the getaway vehicles? — John Perry Barlow

I don't know that I believe in the supernatural, but I do believe in miracles, and our time together was filled with the events of magical unlikelihood. — John Perry Barlow

I ... believe that angels, or something like them, sometimes live among us, hidden within our fellow human beings. — John Perry Barlow

Google, Amazon, Apple. Any number of cloud providers and computer service providers who can increasingly limit your access to your own information, control all your processing, take away your data if they want to, and observe everything you do; in a way, that does give them some leverage over your own life. — John Perry Barlow

New solutions win by virtue of adoption, and they don't get adopted if they're bad solutions. — John Perry Barlow

We cannot separate the air that chokes from the air upon which wings beat. — John Perry Barlow

The Internet may well disempower the nation state, but at the same time, it also strengthens certain specific state functions - like surveillance. As a political entity, it doesn't empower the nation sate. It creates the availability of much more data than the digestive system of the nation state could possibly assimilate. — John Perry Barlow

So I'm just waiting until one party or the other actually gets a moral compass and a backbone. — John Perry Barlow

TV in America created the most coherent reality distortion field that I've ever seen. Therein is the problem: People who vote watch TV, and they are hallucinating like a sonofabitch. Basically, what we have in this country is government by hallucinating mob. — John Perry Barlow

There are a lot of kids out there copying and distributing movies - not because they care about seeing the movies or sharing them with their friends, but because they want to stick it to the movie business. — John Perry Barlow

Most scientific revelations happened after the pursuit of knowledge quit being secret and hermetic. — John Perry Barlow

God's jokes are the soul's curriculum. — John Perry Barlow

Any powerful technology has sauce for the goose and the gander ... It's just an extension of humanity. — John Perry Barlow

The government targets 'Anonymous' for the same reason it targets al-Qaida - because they're the enemy. — John Perry Barlow

I had always thought that the idea of love at first sight was one of those things invented by lady novelists from the South with three names. — John Perry Barlow

The entertainment industry is as it always has been. It's a rough bunch of people and a rough industry. — John Perry Barlow

With the development of the Internet ... we are in the middle of the most transforming technological event since the capture of fire. I used to think that it was just the biggest thing since Gutenberg, but now I think you have to go back farther. — John Perry Barlow

I support freedom of expression, no matter whose, so I oppose DDoS attacks regardless of their target ... they're the poison gas of cyberspace. — John Perry Barlow

Out of the ashes of the music business, comes the rebirth of the musician business. — John Perry Barlow

In Cyberspace, the First Amendment is a local ordinance. — John Perry Barlow

The Corporate impulse for human uniformity instills shame at difference and, thus, the contemporary zeal for privacy. — John Perry Barlow

Relying on the government to protect your privacy is like asking a peeping tom to install your window blinds. — John Perry Barlow

I personally think intellectual property is an oxymoron. Physical objects have a completely different natural economy than intellectual goods. It's a tricky thing to try to own something that remains in your possession even after you give it to many others. — John Perry Barlow

When cryptography is outlawed, bayl bhgynjf jvyy unir cevinpl. — John Perry Barlow

I think the 'counterculture' believes that there are ways to manage being the world's most powerful country that involve creation of consensus - ruling by virtuous example rather than by force of arms. — John Perry Barlow

The Internet amplifies power in all respects. It can grossly exaggerate the power of the individual. — John Perry Barlow

We are creating a world where anyone, anywhere may express his or her beliefs, no matter how singular, without fear of being coerced into silence or conformity. — John Perry Barlow

The one thing that I know government is good for is countervailing against monopoly. It's not great at that either, but it's the only force I know that is fairly reliable. — John Perry Barlow

I'm still strongly opposed to antismoking laws, strongly opposed to any law that regulates personal behavior. — John Perry Barlow

The Internet is the most liberating tool for humanity ever invented, and also the best for surveillance. It's not one or the other. It's both. — John Perry Barlow

I've begun to wonder if we wouldn't also regard spelunkers as desperate criminals if AT&T owned all the caves. — John Perry Barlow

You do not know our culture, our ethics, or the unwritten codes that already provide our society more order than could be obtained by any of your impositions. — John Perry Barlow

The 'Total Information Awareness' project is truly diabolical - mostly because of the legal changes which have made it possible in the first place. As a consequence of the Patriot Act, government now has access to all sorts of private and commercial databases that were previously off limits. — John Perry Barlow

But groundless hope, like unconditional love, is the only kind worth having. — John Perry Barlow

But generally speaking, I felt to engage in the political process was to sully oneself to such a degree that whatever came out wasn't worth the trouble put in. — John Perry Barlow

I think that humor is part of what saves us from despair. — John Perry Barlow

The Internet treats censorship as a malfunction and routes around it. — John Perry Barlow

I don't think that the movie industry is any more ready than any other part of the information industries to adapt itself to the information age. But it's going to go there one way or the other. — John Perry Barlow

It's widely assumed that you can't compete with free, and that seems like a reasonable thing to think. But this has not been my experience. — John Perry Barlow

Incompetence is a double-edged banana. — John Perry Barlow

Our universities are so determined to impose tolerance that they'll expel you for saying what you think and never notice the irony — John Perry Barlow

If someone like Karl Rove had wanted to neutralize the most creative, intelligent, and passionate members of his opposition, he'd have a hard time coming up with a better tool than Burning Man. Exile them to the wilderness, give them a culture in which alpha status requires months of focus and resource-consumptive preparation, provide them with metric tons of psychotropic confusicants, and then ... ignore them. It's a pretty safe bet that they won't be out registering voters, or doing anything that might actually threaten electoral change, when they have an art car to build. — John Perry Barlow

Notions of property, value, ownership, and the nature of wealth itself are changing more fundamentally than at any time since the Sumerians first poked cuneiform into wet clay and called it stored grain ... few people are aware of the enormity of this shift and fewer of them are lawyers or public officials. — John Perry Barlow

I have always felt that no matter how inscrutable its ways and means, the universe is working perfectly and working according to a greater plan than we can know. — John Perry Barlow

If all ideas have to be bought, then you have an intellectually regressive system that will assure you have a highly knowledgeable elite and an ignorant mass. — John Perry Barlow

The more you've got, the shorter it feels. — John Perry Barlow

I mean I look forward to the day when I can be Republican again. — John Perry Barlow

This is so much better than the 60's. So much less self indulgent and desperate. What you have here is a large group of people trying to practice unconditional love for strangers, and for the most part, succeeding. — John Perry Barlow

If you have the 'Total Information Awareness' project working, it might be relatively easy to find everyone who had bought more than a ton of fertilizer and 500 gallons of diesel in the last year, which would be a great way of spotting potential Tim McVeighs - but it would also spot half the farmers and ranchers in America. — John Perry Barlow

Everyone seems to be playing well within the boundaries of his usual rule set. I have yet to hear anyone say something that seemed likely to mitigate the idiocy of this age. — John Perry Barlow

The future's here, we are it, we are on our own — John Perry Barlow

the first responsibility of a human
being is to be a better ancestor. — John Perry Barlow

Most libertarians are worried about government but not worried about business. I think we need to be worrying about business in exactly the same way we are worrying about government. — John Perry Barlow

I have a feeling Virtual Reality will further expose the conceit that 'reality' is a fact. It will provide another reminder of the seamless continuity between the world outside and the world within, delivering another major hit to the old fraud of objectivity. 'Real,' as Kevin Kelly put it, 'is going to be one of the most relative words we'll have.' — John Perry Barlow

The stratosphere is my church. — John Perry Barlow

Art is a service, not a product. Created beauty is a relationship, and a relationship with the Holy at that. Reducing such work to 'content' is like praying in swear words. End of Sermon. Back to business. — John Perry Barlow

If you're not lost, you're not much of an explorer. — John Perry Barlow

We are in the middle of the most transforming technological event since the capture of fire. — John Perry Barlow

I'm a member of that half of the human race which is inclined to divide the human race into two kinds of people. My dividing line runs between the people who crave certainty and the people who trust chance. — John Perry Barlow