American poet, essayist & lyricist (1947-2018)
Don’t trouble yourself with matters you truly cannot change.
JOHN PERRY BARLOW
Principles of Adult Behavior
I have always felt that no matter how inscrutable its ways and means, the universe is working perfectly and working according to a greater plan than we can know.
JOHN PERRY BARLOW
The Death of Cynthia Horner
Become less suspicious of joy.
JOHN PERRY BARLOW
Principles of Adult Behavior
Concern yourself with what is right rather than who is right.
JOHN PERRY BARLOW
Principles of Adult Behavior
Let your life proceed by its own design.
JOHN PERRY BARLOW
"Cassidy"
Your increasingly obsolete information industries would perpetuate themselves by proposing laws, in America and elsewhere, that claim to own speech itself throughout the world. These laws would declare ideas to be another industrial product, no more noble than pig iron. In our world, whatever the human mind may create can be reproduced and distributed infinitely at no cost. The global conveyance of thought no longer requires your factories to accomplish.
JOHN PERRY BARLOW
A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace
You imagine me sipping champagne from your boot
For taste of your elegant pride
I may be going to hell in a bucket, babe
But at least I'm enjoying the ride
JOHN PERRY BARLOW
"Hell in a Bucket"
I ... believe that angels, or something like them, sometimes live among us, hidden within our fellow human beings.
JOHN PERRY BARLOW
The Death of Cynthia Horner
It didn't matter what we did or where we did it as long as we were together. We knew we'd found what most people either pursue in years of futile search or dismiss as a fantasy at the outset: the missing half of ourselves. The real thing.
JOHN PERRY BARLOW
The Death of Cynthia Horner
We will create a civilization of the Mind in Cyberspace. May it be more humane and fair than the world your governments have made before.
JOHN PERRY BARLOW
A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace
Don’t ask more of others than you can deliver yourself.
JOHN PERRY BARLOW
Principles of Adult Behavior
We are forming our own Social Contract. This governance will arise according to the conditions of our world, not yours. Our world is different. Cyberspace consists of transactions, relationships, and thought itself, arrayed like a standing wave in the web of our communications. Ours is a world that is both everywhere and nowhere, but it is not where bodies live.
JOHN PERRY BARLOW
A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace
Due to a sequence of iatrogenic failures I was cruising up and down death's driveway most of 2015. It was kind of an amazing trip. I was in peril for quite a while and gradually it got even more exotic. At one point I had a massive myocardial infarction. They'd been fooling around inside my veins and in the process knocked loose a clot the size of Rhode Island that ended up in my coronary artery. I was as good as gone and didn't have any heartbeat for eight minutes. I was at UCSF Long Hospital when it happened. In any case they put the paddles on me and that didn't work, so they put 'em on again and turned 'em up and it didn't work, then they put 'em on again and turned 'em way up and it burned my skin, and then this amazing intern grabbed my arms and pulled me off the gurney and leaped on my chest with both knees and my heart was kind of like well if you're gonna be like that then I guess I'll beat.
JOHN PERRY BARLOW
"Keeping Up with John Perry Barlow", Tip Jar Mag, April 14, 2016
California, preaching on the burning shore
California, I'll be knocking on the golden door
Like an angel, standing in a shaft of light
Rising up to paradise, I know I'm going to shine
JOHN PERRY BARLOW
"Estimated Prophet"
With a care both conscious and reverential, Cynthia and I built a love which I believe inspired most who came near it. We felt it was our gift to the world. We wanted to show the hesitant the miracle that comes when two people give their hearts unconditionally, honestly, fearlessly, and without reservation or judgement. We wanted to make our union into a message of hope, and I believe we did, even though we knew that hearts opened so freely can be shattered if something should go wrong. As my heart is shattered now.
JOHN PERRY BARLOW
The Death of Cynthia Horner
Black throated wind, keeps on pourin' in
With its words of a life where nothing is new
Ah, mother American night, I pass from the light
Ah, I'm drownin' in you
JOHN PERRY BARLOW
"Black-Throated Wind"
You are terrified of your own children, since they are natives in a world where you will always be immigrants.
JOHN PERRY BARLOW
A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace
There was a shift in consciousness underway, but by the end of '67 I felt like we’d gone too far. I actually considered doing something spectacularly terrible to get America's attention on what was going on with us, because we were sort of driving society over a cliff.
JOHN PERRY BARLOW
"Keeping Up with John Perry Barlow", Tip Jar Mag, April 14, 2016
Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather. We have no elected government, nor are we likely to have one, so I address you with no greater authority than that with which liberty itself always speaks. I declare the global social space we are building to be naturally independent of the tyrannies you seek to impose on us. You have no moral right to rule us nor do you possess any methods of enforcement we have true reason to fear. Governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. You have neither solicited nor received ours. We did not invite you. You do not know us, nor do you know our world. Cyberspace does not lie within your borders.
JOHN PERRY BARLOW
A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace
Expand your sense of the possible.
JOHN PERRY BARLOW
Principles of Adult Behavior