Open Transcripts

Archive

2013 Internet Hall of Fame Interviews: John Perry Barlow

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. 

The Ideas of John Perry Barlow in Uncertain Times

If you’re look­ing to the ques­tion how can the whole thing be reg­u­lat­ed, how can one get con­trol of this whole envi­ron­ment, so as to cre­ate a world in which those orig­i­nal free­doms that Barlow was talk­ing about are shared by every­one, the answer is you can’t do it.

John Perry Barlow’s Usenix 1994 Keynote Address

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.

Virtual Futures Salon: Beyond Bitcoin, with Vinay Gupta

Blockchain is in that space where we still have to explain it, because most of the peo­ple have gone from not hav­ing it around to hav­ing it around. But for kind of the folks that are your age or a lit­tle younger it’s kind of always been there, at which point it doesn’t real­ly need to be explained. It does how­ev­er need to be contextualized.

Virtual Futures Salon: Dawn of the New Everything, with Jaron Lanier

So here’s what hap­pened. If you tell peo­ple you’re going to have this super-open, absolute­ly non-commercial, money-free thing, but it has to sur­vive in this envi­ron­ment that’s based on mon­ey, where it has to make mon­ey, how does any­body square that cir­cle? How does any­body do any­thing? And so com­pa­nies like Google that came along, in my view were backed into a cor­ner. There was exact­ly one busi­ness plan avail­able to them, which was advertising.

Uncreative Writing

With the rise of the Web, writ­ing has met its pho­tog­ra­phy. And by that I mean writ­ing has encoun­tered a sit­u­a­tion sim­i­lar to what hap­pened uh, to paint­ing with the inven­tion of pho­tog­ra­phy. A tech­nol­o­gy so much bet­ter at repli­cat­ing real­i­ty that in order to sur­vive, paint­ing had to ors— or, uh, alter its course radically.

Common Tags

Histories of Violence Internet New America Geek of the Week Internet Hall of Fame 2014 Twitter education open source religion Internet Hall of Fame 2013 infrastructure artificial intelligence politics art community technology Berkman Klein Center algorithms privacy ethics Carl Malamud design surveillance Internet history Internet Hall of Fame