John Perry Barlow


Impression by Max Kisman


This is Bruce Katz chatting with John during Doors 2

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John Perry Barlow's already impressive on-line presence is expanded here because of his activitites within a broader Mediamatic context. He was a keynote speaker at this Doors of Perception 2 @Home conference. His paper was called Home on the Ranch. For interviews by local daylies, he preferred the comfortable leather of our office Chesterfield.

(Doors of Perception is a long-term investigation of interactivity and design at the Netherlands Design Institute in Amsterdam. The Doors of Perception annual conference is co-produced by the Institute and Mediamatic.)


John @home, on stage

John Perry Barlow is a retired Wyoming cattle rancher, a lyricist for the Grateful Dead and co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. He was born in Wyoming in 1947, educated there in a one-room schoolhouse, and graduated from Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut with an honors degree in comparative religion in 1969. In 1971, he began operating the Bar Cross Land and Livestock Company, a large cow-calf operation in Cora, Wyoming where he grew up. He con tinued to do so until he sold it in 1988.

He has been co-writing songs with the Grateful Dead since 1971. In 1990 he and Mitchell Kapor founded the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an organization which promotes freedom of expression in digital media. He is a writer and lecturer on subjects relating to the virtualization of society and is a contributing editor of numerous publications, including Communications of the ACM, Microtimes, and Mondo 2000. He is also a contributing writer for WIRED. He is a recognized commentator on computer security, Virtual Reality, digitized intellectual property, and the social and legal conditions arising in the global network of connected digital devices.

He is probably the only former Republican Country Chairman in America willing to call himself a hippie mystic without lowering his voice. He also recognizes that there is a difference between information and experience and vastly prefers the latter. He is the father of three daughters and lives in Wyoming, New York, and Cyberspace.

You'll find Barlows' `Home on the Ranch' keynote speech here.

More information on John Perry Barlow can be obtained from other Internet sites. His Home Page at the Electronic Frontier Foundation backs up his shift from Wyoming cattle ranching to Cyberspace Jiving. H e did a good linking-job as well!

Surely any Barlow info would be a failure without at least one link to the Greatful Dead On Line...
e-mail: barlow@eff.org.



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