Barlow: It would certainly be better. I don't think anyone is as good as he ought to be.
I had a conversation with Kerry. It was pretty disheartening. I asked how he felt about civil liberties. He said, "I'm for 'em!" That's great, but how do you feel about Section 215 of the Patriot Act? He said, "What's that?" I said, it basically says any privately generated database is available for public scrutiny with an administrative subpoena. He says, "It says that?" I say, "You voted for it!"
He says, "Well, it was a long bill...." Then he went off on this riff about how we had to take some serious measures to stop this terrorist threat, etc. I said, "I fail to see how terrorists present anything like as big a threat to liberty in America as you guys do by passing this kind of legislation. The founding principles of this republic are not being defended where they need to be defended."
He seemed somewhat receptive, but he's a very political guy. Even among his kind. I think he's been in the U.S. Senate long enough to have his backbone dissolved. This was at a small dinner of mostly wealthy people giving him money. But I think Kerry will be somewhat better than Bush, if for no other reason than he is not on the same side in the culture war. Kerry's a Deadhead. He inhaled. He said he didn't like it that much, but he certainly is not out there ready to impose steeper mandatory sentences on possession of drugs.
Reason: But is he ready to eliminate the ones we have?
Barlow: I think so. He's not about to discuss it publicly. Right now he's trying to define himself as only slightly to the left of George Bush.
Kerry isn't perfect, but the alternative is just completely....I hate to keep carping on this, but within the libertarian movement we're gonna have to actually sit down and talk about where we stand on the two variants, because one of them is actually part of the problem at this point. I used to think of myself as both kinds of libertarian, but I have pretty well parted company with [D.C.-based leader of libertarian-leaning conservatives] Grover Norquist at this point. I don't see anything particularly free about a plutocracy.
Reason: I've been rereading some of your early '90s writings about the digital future, and you sounded a lot more optimistic then, with a much more "nothing can stop us now" attitude.
Barlow: We all get older and smarter.
Reason: Still, it seems to me you were mostly right. The Internet promise came true. We do have access to more news, viewpoints, opinions, cultural products than could have been imagined 20 years ago. Doesn't that make worrying about corporate media consolidation a rather antediluvian fear?
Barlow: You now have two distinct ways of gathering information beyond what you yourself can experience. One of them is less a medium than an environment -- the Internet -- with a huge multiplicity of points of view, lots of different ways to find out what's going on in the world. Lots of people are tuned to that, and a million points of view have bloomed. It creates a cacophony of viewpoints that doesn't have any political coherence at all, a beautiful melee, but it doesn't have the capacity to create large blocs of belief.
The other medium, TV, has a much smaller share of viewers than at any time in the past, but those viewers get all their information there. They get turned into a very uniform belief block. TV in America created the most coherent reality distortion field that I've ever seen. Therein is the problem: People who vote watch TV, and they are hallucinating like a sonofabitch. Basically, what we have in this country is government by hallucinating mob.
It's a perfect set of circumstances to give us the time Yeats foretold, with the best having lost all conviction and the worst full of passionate intensity. In my heart of hearts I'm with you. I'm an optimist. In order to be libertarian, you have to be an optimist. You have to have a benign view of human nature, to believe that human beings left to their own devices are basically good. But I'm not so sure about human institutions, and I think the real point of argument here is whether or not large corporations are human institutions or some other entity we need to be thinking about curtailing. Most libertarians are worried about government but not worried about business. I think we need to be worrying about business in exactly the same way we are worrying about government.
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