My greatest hope, and the thing I’ve been working for most of my life now, is that it will realize itself as being something that makes it possible for anybody to know anything that they’re capable of knowing. Which I think is a wonderful thought. Or that it will make it possible for anybody that has something important that other people should hear to say it, without any fear of being shut up or coerced or that sort of thing.
John Perry Barlow
John Perry Barlow’s Usenix 1994 Keynote Address
in Usenix Conference 1994
I honestly believe without hyperbole that people in this room are doing things which will change the world more than anything since the capture of fire, in terms of what it is to be a human being. And I’ll justify that very broad statement here as I go along.