John Perry Barlow

When word came in that John Perry Barlow had died, I thought of some particular comments that have stuck with me, relating his experiences interceding between FBI agents and their hacker quarry, right around the time the Cold War was ending.

I've usually thought of Bruce Sterling's The Hacker Crackdown, fan as I've been of Sterling's fictional works, as my go-to for describing these events. And though it relates something of Barlow's role, it's not what I was looking for.

Rather, I had forgotten having first read of this in the Whole Earth Review (apparently the Fall 1990 issue). It was Barlow himself that wrote that first account to come to me, Crime and Puzzlement.

He saw so many things, then, so clearly, and with such plainly demonstrated empathy. The law has come to cyberspace, in its lumbering, imperfect way, but everything there is still worth reading, and a lot of it still as relevant now as then. The part, in particular, that I remember so well, is ...

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.

You can draw this one a number of ways, of course, like Control vs. Serendipity, Order vs. Chaos, Hard answers vs. Silly questions, or Newton, Descartes & Aquinas vs. Heisenberg, Mandelbrot & the Dalai Lama. Etc.

Large organizations and their drones huddle on one end of my scale, busily trying to impose predictable homogeneity on messy circumstance. On the other end, free-lancers and ne'er-do-wells cavort about, getting by on luck if they get by at all.

However you cast these poles, it comes down to the difference between those who see life as a struggle against cosmic peril and human infamy and those who believe, without any hard evidence, that the universe is actually on our side. Fear vs. Faith.

I am of the latter group. Along with Gandhi and Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, I believe that other human beings will quite consistently merit my trust if I'm not doing something which scares them or makes them feel bad about themselves. In other words, the best defense is a good way to get hurt.

I think cooperating with people--no, cooperating is not a solid enough word, here--rather helping people, working with people, living with people--requires a certain acceptance of their failures and their foibles while being open to something better from them. There's something fundamentally, affectingly humane about Barlow's reaction to Baxter here, and something so vital in the way he places it in the larger analysis of the situation, of our situation, that I've never gotten over.

And that I probably will never get over ... at least, not until I, like Barlow now, am dead.

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