Tech Utopianism And Our Walled Gardens: Is It Time For A Jailbreak?

John Perry Barlow, who died last Wednesday at 70, was one of those unusual figures whose obituaries find no point of common agreement. An Internet evangelist who once wrote song lyrics for the Grateful Dead, Barlow was also a poet, activist, cattle rancher and corporate consultant, whose peripatetic career defied easy summarization. Billboard wrote about his music career; Wired about his Internet activism; Wyoming's Casper Star-Tribune about his boyhood on the Bar Cross Ranch. Barlow, louche and charismatic, had an astonishing number of friends, and their testimonials suggest a man with a taste for the good life and a certain facility for bulls***. No one seemed certain of Barlow's place in history, or how to answer the tougher questions: Is Barlow's utopian futurism still relevant? Was his work as an activist defensible? Was his music any good? But as writers struggled with the complicated legacy of John Perry Barlow, most readers, I suspect, had a different question: Who?

Don't worry: Unless you enjoy suing the government, or were in the tapers' pit at Fillmore in 1976, you are forgiven for not knowing who Barlow was. Born in Wyoming to a family of cattle ranchers, Barlow showed early promise as a writer, garnering a significant advance for his first novel shortly after graduating college. He never finished it,