John Perry Barlow wrote those words in his famous “Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace.” The manifesto was penned in 1996, the day President Clinton signed into law the Telecommunications Act, the first major overhaul of American telecom policy in more than half a century. At that time, of course, most in the general public were still dog paddling around the World Wide Web rather than surfing it at full speed. But Barlow had been keenly aware for years of both the opportunities and the threats posed by cyberspace.
Deadheads probably know Barlow as the lyricist for Bob Weir–sung staples like “Estimated Prophet” and “Hell in a Bucket.” He’s also a poet. An essayist. A retired cattle rancher. A Harvard Fellow. And a onetime campaign manager for Dick Cheney. (He’s since come out emphatically against the Bush regime.) He’s also a towering figure in the technology community, a self-described “techno-crank” who’s been called the “Thomas Jefferson of cyberspace.” In 1990, he was the first to use the latter term, coined by sci-fi godhead William Gibson, to describe the nascent global electronic superstructure known as the Internet, and one of the first to posit cyberspace as a “new frontier,” one categorically different from anything in the material world. And he was the first to make the case that the rights we have accumulated in this sphere should naturally carry over to that one.
There were other people in those early days who were also quite comfortable plumbing the depths of cyberspace. They were called hackers. Cloaking themselves in code names like “NuPrometheus” and “Phiber Optik,” these brash and brilliant kids would spelunk the inner workings of computer systems and telephone networks, sometimes just exploring, but often burglarizing and vandalizing hardware and code.
When the government cracked down in the late ’80s and early ’90s, they responded, as they often do, with an obtuse heavy-handedness, arresting scores of people in secret-service raids with names like Operation Sun Devil. As they did, federal agents often proved that they knew next to nothing about this new technology. Even so, the penalties they sought to inflict on hackers were severe.
This troubled Barlow. And it troubled Mitchell Kapor. Kapor, who then lived in Boston, was a titan in the computer industry. The multi-millionaire founder of Lotus Development Corporation had designed the Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet, the PC’s first “killer application,” which, upon its release in 1983, helped cement computers’ ubiquity in the business world.
Barlow and Kapor were very different people, living more than 2000 miles apart, but they communicated frequently at the WELL (Whole Earth ’Lectronic Link), one of the first virtual communities, which has been bringing tech-savvy people together via scores of electronic bulletin boards since 1985. They also shared a keen interest in these government stings, since they’d both been fingerprinted and questioned by the feds. While not always condoning hackers’ illegal activities, they also realized that serious bounds were being crossed.
“The FBI was totally clueless. Utterly. We were both disturbed by the craziness of it,” says Kapor. “It seemed to me and to John Barlow that there was a vast overreaction, an overreaching. It would be as if people who were actually committing nothing worse than vandalism were being tried for assault.”
