John Perry Barlow 2.0

The Thomas Jefferson of cyberspace reinvents his body -- and his politics.

Brian Doherty from the August/September 2004 issue

(Page 3 of 5)

Barlow: We are involved in some ongoing litigation regarding file sharing, and we're starting to make some progress. We won Grokster v. MGM [which declared that the makers of software that facilitates potential copyright infringement are not liable for such infringement done by users]. But all that law is still in flux, and who knows how it will eventually shake out? The important principle is that there are noninfringing uses for peer-to-peer [P2P] systems. We are trying to do show the continual validity of the decision in the Betamax case [Sony Corporation of America v. Universal City Studios, a 1984 Supreme Court case that declared that neither home tapers of TV shows nor sellers of VCRs were infringing copyright]. When the VCR came into use, [Jack] Valenti [head of the Motion Picture Association of America] tried to stop it. But the Supreme Court ruled that there are significant noninfringing uses of a VCR that were so important to the First Amendment that Mr. Valenti's concerns had to take the backseat.

It was a damn good thing for Valenti that they did, because the movie industry is now heavily dependent on the very thing he was trying to stop. They seem to have forgotten that, and are back saying the only purpose of P2P networks is for illegal trading of owned goods. We claim part of the reason for P2P is for legal trading of what ought to be in public domain. And what is in public domain in many cases.

More important is the ability to quote from movies. The motion picture industry doesn't think you should be able to show anything from a movie unless you get their explicit permission. I think that creates a deadened culture so bound up in legal proceedings that it's never able to do anything creative that involves moving images.

Reason: Do you want to change the fact that downloading a movie is illegal?

Barlow: EFF is well aware of the fact that it is not legal to download movies. Personally, I think if you're downloading movies noncommercially, sharing them with friends as you do when you let them borrow a DVD that you rented last night, that's perfectly fine.

I can't speak for EFF on that, but I would like to change it. The motion picture industry should realize in an information economy that when you've got a lot of free access to commercial goods it does not necessarily reduce their value, because there is a relationship between value and familiarity in informational goods. Despite the fact that there's a huge amount of motion picture piracy at the moment, theaters are doing better than ever.

I get pilloried for saying this -- "Oh, Barlow thinks the Grateful Dead model ought to extend to the world" -- but I don't see any reason why it can't. It worked for us and it has worked for everyone else I've ever seen try it. I think that what we stumbled into was a real deep -- we didn't know it at the time -- a deep quality of how an information economy works. We really did just stumble into it. We just decided it was morally shaky to toss people out of concerts just because they had tape recorders. It's bad for your karma to be mean to a Deadhead. And we thought we'd take a hit on it.

Reason: You recently sent out an e-mail to many of your friends in which you announced that you were coming to think that mere "lifestyle libertarianism" was no longer enough -- that the current political crisis now was so severe that actual gritty electoral political activism was a necessity and a duty. Why?

Barlow: I think you can only go so far ignoring the opposing forces in the cultural war now arrayed against bohemian libertarians. It's like in the '60s, when there were two distinct camps in the boho scene, one of which was Marxist and ideological and political and engaged and humorless to beat the band. And the other one was acid-laced and freewheeling and took the view that if you could change consciousness, politics would take care of itself. I was of that view to a large extent.

I've gone back and forth with politics. I've been a Republican county chairman. I was one of Dick Cheney's campaign managers when he first ran for Congress. But generally speaking, I felt to engage in the political process was to sully oneself to such a degree that whatever came out wasn't worth the trouble put in. I thought it was better to focus on changing yourself and people around you, to not question authority so much as bypass it whenever possible.

But by virtue of our abdication, a very authoritarian, assertive form of government has taken over. And oddly enough, it is doing so in the guise of libertarianism to a certain extent. Most of the people in the think tanks behind the Bush administration's current policies are libertarians, or certainly free marketeers. We've got two distinct strains of libertarianism, and the hippie-mystic strain is not engaging in politics, and the Ayn Rand strain is basically dismantling government in a way that is giving complete open field running to multinational corporatism.

Reason: What are some of the specific actions or policies of the Bush administration that alarm you more than Clinton did, or Reagan or the first Bush?

Barlow: An unwillingness to engage in any kind of mitigation of the free market. 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. But if you've got a truly free market you only have a free market for a while before it becomes completely regulated by those aspects of it that have employed power laws to gain a complete monopoly.

Reason: You've said that Microsoft is in a position where it is achieving control over our minds. Could you elaborate?

Barlow: Any time you engage with information, the reality that you extract from that information is shaped by the tools that deliver it. Microsoft's information presentation is such a monoculture that it edits out a lot of other realities. So you have a new kind of monopoly that affects the way people think in ways that are invisible to them. It's a very dangerous form of monopoly, especially now that they are talking about the "trusted computing" model, where it will be very difficult for you to save and then pass on documents on systems without identifying yourself.