John Perry Barlow / Keynote

For 20 years I was a cattle rancher in Wyoming.

If somebody told me that I was going to find myself at this stage in my life doing this, I would have found that a little improbable.

At that stage of my life, the idea that there could even be this would have been more than a little improbable.

Now, I don't know, this is a fairly large group of people, and I have a hard time seeing faces when the lights are this bright on mine,

but to the extent possible, at some point I want to have something in the way of a conversation with you, even recognizing that it will be very asymmetrical.

Though probably not as symmetrical as the conversation between Comcast and the American people.

But bad anyway. I am trying to eliminate broadcast media, and I don't want to become one.

I'm going to talk about a few major principles and things that I think are very interesting about the phenomenon you represent.

And give you a little insight into.... you know I have to confess I am now an elder of the internet.

For somebody who spent most of his time in his life refusing to ever not be an adolescent, the idea of being an elder is something of a drag.

It turns out to be useful if you can be an adolescent and an elder at the same time.

You've got the same desire to do crazy shit, but you know which crazy shit is likely to fail badly.

That looks like fun, but let me tell you... I remember...

When I first came around the thing I believe I'm, you know it was Bill Gibson's word, but I'm the guy who started using it for what it is.

When I first came around cyberspace, in 1985...

it was very interesting to me that there was already an identifiable culture in this space that was not yet a space.

There was a flavor that it had.

It was just on the strength of that faint whiff of culture that I got the idea that there may one day be a new substrate for community to form in.

Because I came from a small town in Wyoming, and I could see that the community was based on places like my small town in Wyoming,

where family agriculture was at the root of the economics, and there was a sense of shared diversity, and real density in your relationship with your neighbors, and necessity.

I could see that all those things were being supplanted by television land and suburbia,

and a large corporate working environment where it was considered to be good form to make yourself out to be just like everybody else,

so the corporation would think that you were a good interchangeable machine part.

The primary impetus for privacy was so that the company that you wanted to work for wouldn't be able to tell that you, like every other one of the masks that God wears, was weird as hell!

Everybody is, by the way. I used to marvel at these very ordinary people who would talk about how crazy their friends were.

Friends are crazy. If you get down to an actual examination of people on the inside, they're unusual.

I'm one of those people who really insists on talking to you on the airplane.

You hate those, some of you, I know, but I do it anyway.

Mostly to prove to you that you're more interesting than you think you are, which I almost always can.

I was worried about all those kinds of crushing aspects that I could see my country falling into, and my culture, or the world for that matter, with the genericfication of everything.

I became truly convinced that the answer to this was to spread the internet everywhere.

And to have the culture of that set of really almost divinely given intellects and hearts that had been the original uncles of the internet...

have that become something that grew embedded in the culture of cyberspace from their very small point until it included everybody

which it inevitably would. Now we see everything as well.

I actually... at first I thought it was going to be a slam dunk.

I thought that the age of Aquarius was going to be a slam dunk too.

I was already prepared for disappointment.

But I really felt that there was something so naturally liberating about the internet.

That it was about connection; it wasn't about separation, which broadcast media obviously were.

It was about a conversation, it wasn't about the channel. It wasn't about content. Which the word only recently derived when the containers went away.

Note that. It's a code word for "We're a large corporation and we own all human expression and we call it content."

It had the potential, which I still think it has, of giving a voice to everybody, in spite of the fact that that in many cases will be a terrible idea.

I also have faith in the ability of people to create a system where just because everybody has a voice doesn't mean that everybody has to listen to it.

The discriminating digestive systems I think, I thought then and I still think, would evolve.

I was pretty gung-ho on this internet.

I thought that we were just going to actually slide in invisibly, into the gap that would be vacated by the nation states as they realized they had nothing left to do after the cold war.

We got into a global economy. I underestimated them.

I underestimated the three monotheistic world religions who naturally, and I think correctly, regarded the internet as the ultimate heresy.

The internet is about authority gathered by consensus over a large horizontal plane,

where authority is not only not god given, it is earned by a lot of other people having exposed a set of phenomenon to their own perceptions, and judged them to be of the same views of what those phenomenon may represent.

And they need not be filtered through a book or a document or something that is absolutely positively right.

This really plays hell with God given authority, which has been the system that we've been operating under for quite a while.

And when I say under, I do mean under. The great white column with God on the top and you on the bottom,

and mostly male figures in the middle, and three books that you had to adhere to.

As things started to come apart for those things, they became much more fierce in their demand that their constituents observe them religiously, shall we say.

Moreover, I knew that the record business was the ugliest thing that I'd ever seen, but somehow I didn't think that it was quite as ugly as it turned out to be.

What it turned out to be was something that was so ugly that it would rather kill itself, and everybody in it, that do something that was wise and decent.

And that's pretty much what it's done.

I've spent many years trying to explain to them that it's actually not in their best interest to make expression scarce.

There's a huge difference between and information economy and a economy of hard goods

In the sense that Adam Smith was perfectly right about scarcity and value.

It's completely different with expression and information where familiarity has value. Scarcity, not so much.

If I've got the world's largest diamond in my pocket, outside of making a big lump that people might be curious about, nobody will know that it's there.

Or maybe not curious about

Nobody will know that it's there and it will still be incredibly valuable.

If I have the world's greatest song in my head, it is useless, valueless, it has no value until I've started sharing it with people.

Then it gathers value fairly slowly, on the basis of how many people can sing along.

That's a very different thing, and the band that I wrote for discovered this accidentally.

We invented viral marketing without really meaning to, like most of the things we did actually. Very improvisational organization.

LSD will do that to you. Doesn't give you a lot of choice.

We noticed that people were taping our concerts in the early days, and the record people...

the folks at Warner Brothers said we had to stop them because they were stealing something from us, and we kind of went along with that for a while

and then we all said, "Well, what are they stealing?" I mean it's not like we ever played the same show twice.

So is it people won't buy the records if there are these tapes? That doesn't seem right.

And besides, it's just not good for you to be mean to a dead head, especially if your the Grateful Dead, because dead heads are... they're a hapless bunch.

I couldn't do it, and neither could they, so we let people tape our concerts,

not realizing that what was going to happen was that those tapes were going to be this unbelievably effective system for spreading the word about what we did.

By the time we actually did die, actually I don't know whether we've died yet, we still seem to cling to weird life,

I would say we were done when Jerry Garcia was back in 1995, but at that point we could fill any stadium and maybe the world, without ever having had a hit record.

Based on the fact that all of our tapes had been big hits, and the fact that we could haul our audience around with us.

Which, it's good if you can do that.

But this brings me around to you folks in a way.

Part of the reason we could haul our audience around with us, and part of the reason why that sharing and sense of community was so critical among the dead heads,

is what intrigues me about you Pythonistas. There have been cultures associated with languages before, French is a good example.

I rode here yesterday, god bless him, I don't know if he's in the audience, but Tarek Zaieda, I think I slaughtered your name, Tarek.

who is French, and he was on both of the hideous flights that I was on. We took great comfort in one another, and I was talking about the French academy in French language,

and Python and how culture and the language itself had this mutually defining quality, and where authority lay in that system.

One of the things that occurred to me when I first encountered the internet, I turned to my friend Mitch Kapor with whom I started the EFF

I said "At last, it's a working anarchy!". He said, "Well, probably, but it's been my observation that inside every working anarchy there's an old boy network."

In this case I think we may have a young girl network that's coming along too. That's not lip service.

Part of the reason I'm here is because that is actually a very interesting thing about you pythons. There are a lot of you that despite the big phallic symbol for the snake just went ahead and did it anyway.