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John Perry Barlow has died

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91–100 of 140 posts

Re: John Perry Barlow has died

#91

If Barlow doesn't deserve the HN black bar, I don't know who does. He fought for electronic freedoms tirelessly for decades, fending off companies who wanted to control the Internet or individuals' rights to hack technology they own.

Absolutely he deserves the black bar, please!

Re: John Perry Barlow has died

#92
post #37

I didn't see a link to his lyrics for Grateful Dead songs yet. My favorite is Cassady. What an inspiration between EFF and the Dead. https://w2.eff.org/Misc/Publications/John_Perry_Barlow/HTML/...

What you are, what you're meant to be. Speaks his name, though you were born to me

Re: John Perry Barlow has died

#94

    This must be heaven --
    Tonight I crossed the line.
    You must be the angel
    I thought I'd never find.
    Was it you I heard singin'
    While I was chasin' dreams?
    Driven by the wind,
    Like the dust that blows around
    And the rain fallin' down...

Re: John Perry Barlow has died

#95

Such a loss. Who is the thought leader today to push back on the huge curtailment of online freedoms happening around the world. Even in the HN crowd, you see people succumbing to nationalism and making arguments to support their government's right to impose their court decisions on foreign jurisdictions in cyberspace. The problem isn't just the Great Firewall, it's stuff like Turkey or Thailand getting YouTube to ta…

Richard Stallman and Eben Moglen are who I take a lot of similar (but not the same) inspiration from these days. He's dead now too, and not a technologist, but I also took a lot of inspiration from the admonitions of freedom to read and freedom of speech from Christopher Hitchens.

Re: John Perry Barlow has died

#97

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace by John Perry Barlow Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather. We have no elected government, nor are we likely to have one, so I address you with no greater…

Wow, that's one of the most idealistic statements I've ever read. Too bad we ended up with the WWW of today instead.

It's not over yet

Re: John Perry Barlow has died

#98
post #37

I didn't see a link to his lyrics for Grateful Dead songs yet. My favorite is Cassady. What an inspiration between EFF and the Dead. https://w2.eff.org/Misc/Publications/John_Perry_Barlow/HTML/...

My favorite is Let It Grow (from weather report suite).

It's such a beautiful piece of music. Really gets down deep into the nature of life.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IN6mjNMNytY

https://play.google.com/music/preview/Tuuldprggcev2wah45v27l...

I listened to this album for years and didn't understand that song until recently when I went back and listened again.

I don't think the song is about an agricultural town and a women fetching water as it first appears. I think it's symbolic. The women is dipping into the river of life and carrying a little part away with her. She is brown like the earth because in this case she is symbolic of the earth, i.e. the substrate on which life appears or develops. The drops of water in the reeds are individual instances of life, eventually they lose their individuality and return to the ocean. The plowman is sowing the earth. Etc. Etc.

Re: John Perry Barlow has died

#99

If Barlow doesn't deserve the HN black bar, I don't know who does. He fought for electronic freedoms tirelessly for decades, fending off companies who wanted to control the Internet or individuals' rights to hack technology they own.

Absolutely he deserves the black bar, please!

Yes. Black bar. Let's have it.

Re: John Perry Barlow has died

#100
post #35

My JPB Story (from ~1998): I grew up in New Delhi in the late 90s on a steady diet of 2600, phrack, BBSes and the EFF/internet. Two of the people I'd read a lot about and was very inspired by were JPB and Mitch Kapor, as founders of the EFF - and I decided one day that I'd like to actually reach out and talk to Barlow (I didn't actually have a goal in mind, now that I think about it). Figuring that an email would nev…

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