RIP John Perry Barlow

The Herald reports:

John Perry Barlow, an internet activist and lyricist for the Grateful Dead, has died.

The digital-rights group Electronic Frontier Foundation said Barlow died early Wednesday in his sleep at home in San Francisco. He was 70.

The cause of death was not immediately known. Barlow had been battling a variety of debilitating illnesses since 2015, according to supporters who organized a benefit concert for him in October 2016.

Barlow co-founded the EFF in 1990 to champion free expression and privacy online. In a 1996 manifesto, the “Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace,” he argued that the U.S. and other governments shouldn’t impose their sovereignty on the “global social space we are building.”

His declaration of independence has inspired millions, including myself. Some of my favourite parts:

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.

We have no elected government, nor are we likely to have one, so I address you with no greater authority than that with which liberty itself always speaks. I declare the global social space we are building to be naturally independent of the tyrannies you seek to impose on us. You have no moral right to rule us nor do you possess any methods of enforcement we have true reason to fear.

The future hasn’t been as optimistic as Barlow would have had it, but the Internet remains hugely empowering as a source of information governments can’t control.