With a damaged coronary heart I need to recount that EFF’s founder, visionary, and our ongoing inspiration, John Perry Barlow, passed away quietly in his sleep this morning. We can ride away out Barlow and his wisdom for an extended time to reach encourage, and he’s going to consistently be an predominant part of EFF.
It’s no exaggeration to claim that main parts of the Cyber net all of us know and adore on the new time exist and thrive attributable to Barlow’s imaginative and prescient and management. He consistently noticed the Cyber net as a fundamental position of freedom, the assign voices prolonged silenced can procure an viewers and of us can connect with others irrespective of bodily distance.
Barlow became once infrequently held up as a straw man for a more or less naive techno-utopianism that believed that the Cyber net would possibly perchance well perchance also solve all of humanity’s complications without causing to any extent extra. As somebody who spent the past 27 years working with him at EFF, I’m able to claim that nothing will likely be extra from the reality. Barlow knew that unique know-how would possibly perchance well perchance also attach and empower fallacious as a lot because it would possibly in all probability in all probability well perchance also attach and empower like minded. He made a aware resolution to focal point on the latter: « I knew it’s also beautiful that a like minded system to create the future is to foretell it. So I predicted Utopia, hoping to provide Liberty a working originate before the regulations of Moore and Metcalfe delivered up what Ed Snowden now accurately calls ‘turn-key totalitarianism.’”
Barlow’s lasting legacy is that he devoted his life to making the Cyber net into “an world that every body would possibly perchance well perchance also simply enter without privilege or prejudice accorded by speed, financial energy, militia power, or assign of abode of beginning . . . an world the assign anyone, wherever would possibly perchance well perchance also simply stutter his or her beliefs, irrespective of how singular, without be troubled of being coerced into silence or conformity.”
In the days and weeks to reach encourage, we are able to be talking and writing more about what an unparalleled position Barlow performed for the Cyber net and the sphere. And as consistently, we are able to continue the work to fulfill his dream.
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