Doherty on Barlow in Reason
I got tired of the Kevin Kelly/Wired magazine-style of breathless technological optimism pretty early on. “The future’s here, and it’s amazing!” To a certain extent I’ve let my disdain for the stylistic approach those folks use spill over into a generalized dislike of the whole Bay Area techno-libertarian scene. But having put my wank-o-meter in neutral long enough to read this John Perry Barlow interview by Brian Doherty, I found that it’s actually pretty interesting.
I especially like the discussion of his fight against a misdemeanor drug bust. (He had a small amount of marijuana in his checked luggage while flying; it was found during a Department of Homeland Security search and they pulled him off the plane before departure and arrested him. He’s fighting to exclude the evidence on Fourth Amendment grounds.) I also like his take on John Kerry; it matches up almost exactly with my own.
Anyway, from the latest issue of Reason magazine: John Perry Barlow 2.0: The Thomas Jefferson of cyberspace reinvents his body — and his politics.
