[DMCA-Activists] Re: [DMCA_Discuss] Cognitive Dissident: John Perry Barlow

[Bill Kowalczyk]

I thought the DMCA discussion group had something to do with the DMCA.  Let's keep on the subject.  If I wanted to hear about new Government conspiracy theories or specious arguments that any attempt to ferret out terrorist communications immediatly  leads to the fall of American Democracy, I would be on some other discussion groups.

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From: Seth Johnson

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Subject: [DMCA_Discuss] Cognitive Dissident: John Perry Barlow

Date: Mon, 03 Feb 2003 10:59:52 -0500

(Forwarded from Interesting People list)

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Date: Mon, 03 Feb 2003 06:38:37 -0500

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Cognitive Dissident

John Perry Barlow, the man who coined the term 'cyberspace',

discusses the Total Information Awareness project, online

activism, file sharing, and the prospect of a digital

counterculture.

Tim Dickinson

February 3, 2003 Does the government need a search warrant

to read your private email? Do you have a right to anonymity

online? Is computer code protected by the first amendment?

On all three counts the answer is yes, and for that you can

thank the Electronic Frontier Foundation -- and by

extension, John Perry Barlow -- for staking out those rights

in court.

The EFF is a digital civil liberties union, co-founded by

Barlow in 1990 to fight for free-speech and privacy rights

in cyberspace -- a term which Barlow coined. A

self-described "classic boomer," Barlow is still best known

for his first career, songsmithing for the Grateful Dead,

with classics like "Cassidy," "Estimated Prophet," and "A

Little Light" to his credit. After a go as a

back-to-the-land cattle rancher, Barlow, 55, is now starring

in a digital third act, one that may well fulfill his

ultimate aspiration: "To be a good ancestor."

When I first met John Perry Barlow, he was sporting a black

ascot, a turquoise pendant, and a hands-free cellular device

that dangled, secret-service style, from his left ear; he

was wired and buzzed, working the unabashedly geeky crowd at

the EFF's holiday open house in San Francisco's Mission

district. Afterward, I pressed Barlow for his take on the

Total Information Awareness project -- the Bush

Administration's Big-Brotherish effort to preempt terrorism

by analyzing our purchasing habits and other previously

private data -- as well as his thoughts on Internet

activism, file sharing, and counterculture in the 21st

century.

MotherJones.com: What do you make of the Total Information

Awareness project?

John Perry Barlow: I was just writing a spam to my friends

last night about its "all seeing eye" logo [The logo has

since been changed - Ed.]. Looking at that logo, you've got

to wonder if they aren't just engaged in some massive prank

on us. It's hilarious -- straight out of a Thomas Pynchon

novel. Can you beat it? It's fortunate that this is so

stupefyingly funny.

MJ: But do you think that we run the danger of laughing it

off and missing the danger of it?

JPB: I don't think so. I think that humor is part of what

saves us from despair. The Total Information Awareness

project is truly diabolical -- mostly because of the legal

changes which have made it possible in the first place. As a

consequence of the Patriot Act, government now has access to

all sorts of private and commercial databases that were

previously off limits.

MJ: Is that what they're hiding behind?

JPB: It's a combination of the Patriot Act and a Justice

Department directive that was issued in May by John

Ashcroft. Now I believe that this invasion of privacy is

just as unconstitutional as its ever been, but nothing is

unconstitutional until somebody's taken it to court and

proven it.

MJ: Do you think the goal of preempting terrorism through

data-mining is feasible, from a technological perspective?

JPB: The thing that spooks me about the Total Information

Awareness program is that that it's inside DARPA [the

Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency]. And unlike the

CIA or the NSA, DARPA has a great track record of actually

going out and making big technology happen -- because

they're small, they're light, they're anti-bureaucratic,

they're engineering minded. And Poindexter may be a

convicted felon but he's a very, very smart guy. So where

while I'd like to say there's no way that this is going to

happen under any other circumstances, I'm less assured of

that at the moment.

MJ: Somebody said that this is going to lead to them finding

a lot more haystacks than needles.

JPB: [Laughs.] That's absolutely true. If you have the Total

Information Awareness project working, it might be

relatively easy to find everyone who had bought more than a

ton of fertilizer and 500 gallons of diesel in the last

year, which would be a great way of spotting potential Tim

McVeighs -- but it would also spot half the farmers and

ranchers in America. But having spotted them, it couldn't

toss them out until it'd exposed them to the next layer of

search. And the important thing to think about there is that

they're no longer just looking for terrorist activity,

they're looking for any kind of criminality at all -- which

includes what I consider to be cultural crimes, like say

marijuana smoking.

The terrifying new reality that we're dealing with here is

the fact that all data are is now open to government

scrutiny. All these things that have previously been

sacrosanct and private are now available. And what's more

frightening is that if you are managing one of those

databases and the government says that it wants access to it

for a completely open-ended search you are criminally liable

if you if you tell the people in your database that the

government is doing so. The whole dive shop thing [in June

of last year], the government requested the records of

everyone in the U.S. taking diving lessons] was exposed

because one solitary dive shop owner in Los Angeles had the

guts to come forward and say "Hey, we're not going to give

you our database. And furthermore we're going to go to the

press."

MJ: TIA hopes to root out terrorists by monitoring -- among

other things -- our purchasing habits and travel records.

But looking at this kind of data mining in the commercial

sector, it's clearly an imperfect science. I keep reading

stories about how somebody's TIVO thinks he's gay because he

watched one too many Sex in and the City's. Can we possibly

expect better from the government?

JPB: They've already done some of this inferential searching

-- and the way they're going about it is enough to give you

pause.

MJ: Part of the Homeland Security Bill is something called

the "Cyber Security Enhancement Act" under which "malicious"

hackers can be sent to prison for life.

JPB: It's ridiculous, dangerous, grossly unconstitutional,

and it's perfectly in keeping with what this

administration's been doing across the board. This is an

administration that has recently reserved to itself the

right to kill American citizens anywhere on the planet for

the mere suspicion of membership in Al Qaeda. That's really

quite and awe-inspiring breakthrough. And the astonishing

thing is that the American people are nodding along in their

stupor and saying "Yeah, well, whatever it takes to stop

terrorism." I'm so disappointed in my countrymen.

MJ: What do you think it will take to knock people out of

that stupor?

JPB: What it's going to take is for some of these

initiatives to actually start affecting people out in the

'burbs. But they're so insensate at the moment, that one

wonders how much it will take to effect them. Right now,

it's very easy for your standard suburban television idiot

to assume that this is all about people who are not like

him. And his rights are not involved. By the time he finds

out that his rights have been involved, they may have been

so thoroughly eroded that he may never be able to get them

back. But you as the Navajo say, "It's impossible to awaken

a man who is pretending to be asleep." And I think that

mostly what America is doing is pretending to be asleep.

MJ: Do you really think that -- that your average American

is well aware what's going on?

JPB: Aware in some way that's subject to massive denial.

We're aware but feel ourselves to be so helpless that we

can't even summon up the necessary energy to drive five

blocks to vote against it.

A Digital Counterculture?

MJ: At the EFF party, you and R.U. Sirius were talking about

being part of a counterculture without a name, and I was

wondering if you could tell me a little more about what you

meant by that.

JPB: It occurred to me recently that I'd been a member of

every counterculture that had been available throughout my

conscious life. I started out as a teenage beatnik and then

became a hippie and then became a cyberpunk. And now I'm

still a member of the counterculture, but I don't know what

to call that. And I'd been inclined to think that that was a

good thing, because once the counterculture in America gets

a name then the media can coopt it, and the advertising

industry can turn it into a marketing foil. But you know,

right now I'm not sure that it is a good thing, because we

don't have any flag to rally around. Without a name there

may be no coherent movement.

MJ: What would be the organizing principles of this

counterculture?

JPB: Well, for starters, that practically everything that

this administration is doing right now is fucked. [Laughs]

MJ: I'll make sure we print that.

JPB: Of course you've got to have a more intelligent

response than that, but it's hard for me to rise above 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. Managing the world that has fallen to

us to manage in a way that it has some morality. I think

that that counterculture is very concerned about the

completely unchecked ability of multinational corporations

to roam the planet and serve their hungers without any

meaningful regulation now. That counterculture probably

agrees that mass media are bad for you, particularly

television. I suppose drugs are an element. And it

appreciates irony -- as opposed to the administration, which

clearly has an irony deficiency.

MJ: What little resistance there is right now in terms of an

antiwar movement seems to be organizing online. Is that a

good thing?

JPB: Actually I'm discouraged with the role of the Internet

in the antiwar movement. Because so far what I see happening

is that cyberspace is a great place for everybody to

declaim. There are a million virtual streetcorners with a

million lonely pamphleteers on them, all of them decrying

the war and not actually coming together in any organized

fashion to oppose it. It strikes me that existing political

institutions -- whether it's the administration or Congress

or large corporations -- only respond to other institutions.

I don't care how many individuals you have marching in the

streets, they're not going to pay attention until there's a

leader for those individuals who can come forward and say I

represent the organization of those individuals and we're

going to amass the necessary money and votes to kick you the

hell out of office. Then they pay attention. But not until.

And so right at the moment it would strike me that the

Internet is counterproductive to peace.

MJ: I'm rather shocked to hear you say that.

JPB: Well, I'm rather shocked to say it.

MJ: Is it that people just leave their anger online?

JPB: You vent online and then you dust your hands off in

satisfaction and that's the last you do. And I'm as guilty

of this as anybody. Though in fairness I can point to EFF as

being an example that that's not all I do.

MJ: Who got the future better: Philip Dick, George Orwell,

or Aldous Huxley?

JPB: All of those guys were talking about the present,

that's what science fiction writers really do. I've been

struck lately rereading Brave New World and 1984 at the

extent to which both of these visions, which would seem to

be completely contradictory, have turned out to be true and

in fact complementary. You have the totalitarian thought

control and language modification of 1984 going on: I mean,

consider the phrase "weapons of mass destruction" --

completely Orwellian in use. And at the same time you have

something like the feelies from Brave New World which are

the soporific media message that puts everyone to sleep.

Both of those things are happening simultaneously. The

totalitarian message is being transmitted while you're zoned

out in front of the television watching the feelies, high on

soma -- which is some combination of Prozac and Budweiser.

MJ: I was reading an old roundtable you did with Harper's,

and I was struck by how optimistic you were then.

JPB: Somebody came up to me after a talk I gave recently in

London, and he said to me that there's something

entertaining about watching a pathological optimist try to

be pessimistic. [Laughs.] And he had a point. I'm basically

an optimistic person. And lately I've been thinking a lot

about groundless hope -- which in some respects may be the

only kind there is. If your hope has good reasons attached

to it, then maybe it's just a form of planning. I think that

election was a consequence of people becoming hopeless. If

people had hope they'd vote.

MJ: Is it true you used to be a Republican?

JPB: Yeah, actually, until embarrassingly recently. There

is, in small numbers these days, though it used to be

larger, a libertarian wing of Republicanism that fit my

political beliefs pretty succinctly. But that was before

George Bush II and the Christian fascists took over.

To Share or Not to Share?

MJ: As a former lyricist still making money on royalties,

what are your thoughts about online file sharing?

JPB: You'd be hard pressed to find somebody who is more

passionate about the belief that sharing music is good for

you as a songwriter and good for humanity as a whole. The

best thing that ever happened to the Grateful Dead, from an

economic standpoint, was giving away our music.

MJ: In terms of bootlegging?

JPB: It wasn't bootlegging. We let people tape our concerts

and distribute the tapes. And that became the first example

I can think of viral marketing. The record companies

certainly didn't know how to market us. So we became

self-marketing through our tapes.

MJ: And that helped you economically?

JPB: No question. And it makes sense that it would. Because

economic success in an information economy depends not on

scarcity, but on familiarity. You can be the greatest

songwriter in the history of song and if 10 people are the

only ones who ever heard your songs, it doesn't matter.

MJ: But what if 100 million people can get it online and

nobody pays you a cent.

JPB: But it doesn't tend to work that way in practice.

Despite the fact that Deadheads had better recordings of all

of our songs than we were putting out commercially, just

about all of our albums have gone platinum over the years.

Having the noncommercial version of information does not

appear to operate genuinely as an inhibition against getting

the commercial version. And also there are other ways of

conducting commerce other than selling material objects with

information on them. Performance for example. That's where

most of the money is.

All of this stuff about 'piracy' is fomented entirely by the

record and film industries to perpetuate business models

that are completely disadvantageous to both the creator and

the audience. They are the biggest pirates in the deal. But

unfortunately, they have made huge amounts of campaign

donations and essentially created all the government that

money can buy. And they have Congress. Congress is passing

laws like the Digital Millennium Copyright Act which make it

so you can't break open the bottles that they're pouring

your knowledge into. They directly contravene the right to

know. The right to know, I think, though it may not be

explicit in the Constitution is every bit as important as

the right to speak.

MJ: Quick response: Does Google have too much power?

JPB: I would say not -- given that they don't seem to be

using it in a way that is monopolistic or apt to consolidate

that power. Their power is based entirely on the fact that

their software is better than anybody else's, unlike say

Microsoft.

MJ: Phish, the band.

JPB: My reaction to that is changing. My first reaction was

I've been there, done that, with better. But I think they've

evolved, and I'm eager to hear them now that they're back

together.

MJ: Would you clone yourself?

JPB: The idea that a clone is you is ridiculous. A clone is

no more you than an identical twin is you. And even less so,

because a clone is born in a different part of time. But,

yeah, I'd probably clone myself.

MJ: Favorite obscure website.

JPB: Disinfo.com.

MJ: Worst piece of digital legislation?

JPB: Oh God, there is so much competition for that but I

would say the Patriot Act taken in all of its digital

dimensions. Otherwise I would say the Digital Millennium

Copyright Act.

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and gifts from generous readers like you.

© 2002 The Foundation for National Progress

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