John Perry Barlow Quotes

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.

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.

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.

The stratosphere is my church.

The Internet treats censorship as a malfunction and routes around it.

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.

Most scientific revelations happened after the pursuit of knowledge quit being secret and hermetic.

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.

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

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.

I think that humor is part of what saves us from despair.

We are in the middle of the most transforming technological event since the capture of fire.

I may be going to hell in a bucket Babe, at least I'm enjoying the ride.

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.

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.

But groundless hope, like unconditional love, is the only kind worth having.

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.

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

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

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

If you're not lost, you're not much of an explorer.

God's jokes are the soul's curriculum.

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.

Out of the ashes of the music business, comes the rebirth of the musician business.

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.

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.

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

I mean I look forward to the day when I can be Republican again.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The future's here, we are it, we are on our own

The Internet amplifies power in all respects. It can grossly exaggerate the power of the individual.

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.

When cryptography is outlawed, bayl bhgynjf jvyy unir cevinpl.

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.

We cannot separate the air that chokes from the air upon which wings beat.

the first responsibility of a human
being is to be a better ancestor.

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.

The more you've got, the shorter it feels.

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 ...

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.

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

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.

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.

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