RIP John Perry Barlow

The Grateful Dead family has lost another great.   Barlow was one of the coolest guys on the planet.   He also figures prominently in the Netflix documentary,  "The Other One: The Long Strange Trip of Bob Weir", which is one of the best things I have seen on Netflix.    Sounds great on the Mu-So, too.

This is from the San Jose Mercury News:

John Perry Barlow, the lyricist for many classic Dead songs, died Feb. 6 at the age of 70.The cause of death is not yet known. News of his passing came via the website of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), the groundbreaking San Francisco-based organization Barlow co-founded in 1990 to promote free expression and privacy online.

Barlow’s contributions to the Internet are massive and well-documented, but he also made substantial contributions to one of the greatest rock ‘n’ roll bands of all time. He worked primarily as a lyricist and songwriter with the Dead’s Bob Weir, whom he met while attending high school in Colorado.

Here’s a look at Barlow’s best.

“Cassidy”: The Weir-Barlow duo was never better than on this memorable tune originally released on Weir’s first solo album, 1972’s “Ace,” and then on 1981’s “Reckoning,” 1990’s “Without a Net” and other Grateful Dead live efforts. The song was reportedly named after Cassidy Law, who was the daughter of legendary Grateful crew member Rex Jackson and Weir’s close friend Eileen Law. Also check out the great version Suzanne Vega does on the Dead tribute album “Deadicated.”

 “Mexicali Blues”: It’s believed to be the first Weir-Barlow collaboration and it’s definitely a keeper — a rambling cowboy tune that owes a debt to Marty Robbins’ “El Paso” (which the Dead often covered).

“Throwing Stones”: One of the standout tracks from 1987’s “In the Dark,” “Throwing Stones” is a definite nominee for the best song the Dead created during the later part of its career — a powerful rocker addressing social concerns.

“Estimated Prophet”: The song provides a mesmerizing start to 1977’s “Terrapin Station,” kicking up a dust of psychedelia that still sounds satisfying to this day.

“Hell in a Bucket”: It’s another great rocker from “In the Dark,” which formed a great one-two punch with “Touch of Grey.”

 “The Music Never Stopped”: This song from the Dead’s eighth studio album, 1975’s “Blues for Allah,” became an anthem for the band and, especially, its fabled fans – the Deadheads.

“We Can Run”: Barlow collaborated with Grateful Dead vocalist-keyboardist Brent Mydland on a number of songs for the band’s last studio effort, 1989’s “Built to Last.” This passionate number addressing environment concerns might be the best of the bunch.

“I Need a Miracle”: Speaking of Deadheads, the title of this song became the ultimate catchphrase for anyone needing a ticket to a show (sold out or otherwise).

“Weather Report Suite”: Barlow contributed to this magical musical epic that brings the Dead’s sixth album, 1973’s “Wake of the Flood,” to a satisfying conclusion.

“Looks Like Rain”: Our final pick from “Ace,” which was a highlight of Grateful Dead shows for years.

This is from Stratechery:  Barlow was also the founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). From the foundation’s website:

With a broken heart I have to announce that EFF’s founder, visionary, and our ongoing inspiration, John Perry Barlow, passed away quietly in his sleep this morning. We will miss Barlow and his wisdom for decades to come, and he will always be an integral part of EFF.

It is no exaggeration to say that major parts of the Internet we all know and love today exist and thrive because of Barlow’s vision and leadership. He always saw the Internet as a fundamental place of freedom, where voices long silenced can find an audience and people can connect with others regardless of physical distance.

Barlow was sometimes held up as a straw man for a kind of naive techno-utopianism that believed that the Internet could solve all of humanity’s problems without causing any more. As someone who spent the past 27 years working with him at EFF, I can say that nothing could be further from the truth. Barlow knew that new technology could create and empower evil as much as it could create and empower good. He made a conscious decision to focus on the latter: “I knew it’s also true that a good way to invent the future is to predict it. So I predicted Utopia, hoping to give Liberty a running start before the laws of Moore and Metcalfe delivered up what Ed Snowden now correctly calls ‘turn-key totalitarianism.’”

In 1996 Barlow wrote A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace:

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…Your legal concepts of property, expression, identity, movement, and context do not apply to us. They are all based on matter, and there is no matter here…

Your increasingly obsolete information industries would perpetuate themselves by proposing laws, in America and elsewhere, that claim to own speech itself throughout the world. These laws would declare ideas to be another industrial product, no more noble than pig iron. In our world, whatever the human mind may create can be reproduced and distributed infinitely at no cost. The global conveyance of thought no longer requires your factories to accomplish.

I have often compared the impact of the Internet Revolution to the Industrial Revolution, but as Barlow astutely points out, the means of impact is fundamentally different. The industrial revolution was predicated on things — specifically, the newfound capability to produce massive new amounts of things at a fraction of the cost — but on the Internet there are no things, and there are no costs. Barlow was determined to keep it that way.

Finally, here are his 25 Principles of Adult Behavior.  This belongs more in the Padded Cell in the late Trump thread.

https://kottke.org/18/02/a-lis...by-john-perry-barlow