Douglas Rushkoff on Wed, 14 Feb 2018 11:17:38 +0100 (CET)


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Re: <nettime> John Perry Barlow R.I.P.


Oh shoot. 

For what itâ??s worth, Barlow lived more in most days than the majority of people live in a year or a lifetime. 

He was *finally* working on the book that Penguin contracted him to write back in the late 1980â??s about the emerging culture of cyberspace. I sure hope he got enough done for it to be edited and published. 

I always felt like his Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace misrepresented his real thinking about the relationship of law, order, business, and cyber culture. Yes, it had a libertarian, anti-government stance. But that was a very anti-government moment, as far as the net was concerned. They were arresting hackers (Operation SunDevil) and censoring content (Computer Decency Act). Of course, by working to make the net a government-free zone, this approach just opened it to the corporations who poured in. But I think it was hard to see that coming, particularly for the early libertarians of the net, who thought small and local business would be favored in such a seemingly a bottom-up, decentralized environment. 



----------

Douglas Rushkoff
http://rushkoff.com <http://rushkoff.com/>
â?¢Founder, Laboratory for Digital Humanism
â?¢Professor of Media Theory and Digital Economics, CUNY/Queens
â?¢Fellow, Institute for the Future

Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus <https://www.indiebound.org/book/9781617230172> my new book on what went wrong in the digital economy and how to fix it.
Team Human <http://teamhuman.fm/> - my weekly podcast promoting human intervention in the machine

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> On Feb 8, 2018, at 5:59 AM, Patrice Riemens <patrice@xs4all.nl> wrote:
> 
> 
> (bwo Barbara Strebel)
> 
> https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/02/john-perry-barlow-internet-pioneer-1947-2018
> 



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