Publication: The Guardian Date: January 11, 1996 Author: Wendy M. Grossman Title: Me and my gizmo: John Perry Barlow *This is the text of the article as submitted, before editing. To quote, please refer to the published version.* John Perry Barlow likes to tell the story of the time he lost a gizmo competition to Marvin Minsky. Barlow matched Minsky knife for knife and flashlight for flashlight. Minsky trumped him with the 40-foot rope he wears as a belt and which he once used to save his daughter's life. So, yes, Barlow had a hard time choosing his main travelling companion. He is the man who said that 'cyberspace is where your money is'. His current career description is 'cognitive dissident' or 'performing philosopher on the subject of information'. In other lives he had a narrow escape from Harvard law school (instead he went to India to write a novel, never finished) and a near miss at being a promo man for Warner Brothers records. He's a former lyricist for the Grateful Dead and a retired Wyoming cattle rancher, in which career he managed to stay $1 million in debt for 17 years. He'd 'rather pump septic tanks than write' prose ('you can never tell whether you did any good or not -- not like building a fence'). He does not wear snakeskin boots. This year's main gizmos are a mobile phone, a PowerBook (which he refused to talk about on the grounds that 'it's too boring'), a Swiss Army knife, and a thing he calls the 'Brain Imager'. This is a small, black plastic box with a shower of fibre optic cables springing out of it like one of those 1960s lamps. At the end of each cable is a little, red light, the idea being that you press a couple of these against your eyelids while he varies the flicker rate and dances around. 'Next to my children and irony I like dancing better than anything else.' Whatever you're supposed to see -- one person reported green and yellow moire patterns -- all I got was red. Over dim sum in a San Francisco restaurant where, next to the tanks of crabs, lobsters, and catfish, there's an extra tank where live shrimp glide on little, whirring legs awaiting execution, Barlow whirled it over his head to demonstrate its full potential. The waiter thought it was a summons. I had thought it was his collection of world telephone plugs. But Barlow's favourite gizmo is his Swiss Army knife. It's black, not red, and has every gadget known to Victorinox. Barlow's used them all, even the buttonhook. 'When I was in the cattle business,' he says, 'one of my great delights was that something broke around me about every five minutes, because my ranch was in the coldest place in the lower 48 states, so everything was always really cold and brittle, and most of the equipment was a lot older than I was and didn't have any parts that you could buy. So what I learned how to do was fix things that couldn't be fixed, all the time.' Barlow's in San Francisco hawking his current notion that cyberspace should be made its own sovereign state. 'Cyberspace is naturally sovereign for a variety of reasons -- for the reasons that a place becomes naturally sovereign when it's been colonised by somebody else. If the terms and conditions of the place are so different from the terms and conditions of the colonial power, sooner or later it becomes obvious that it makes better sense for it to be self-ordering or self-governing.' He picks an analogy. 'One of the things that happened quite frequently with the British Empire is that Britain realised that from a purely economic standpoint its self-interest was better served by a more or less equal relationship with the former colony as a member of the Commonwealth rather than having it as being an ungovernable, restless, and angry colony. And that analogy applies very well in this instance, because the citizens of cyberspace are going to become more restless and intractable as time goes on, and less willing to be governed by terrestrial principles.' Even the recent waves of mass immigration don't hurt this, he argues. 'The culture of the net has managed to stay more or less the time from the time when I first encountered it, when there were maybe 100,000 people, max, to the point now where we've got maybe 30 or 40 million, and it still has the amazing sort of libertarian bent. I can't imagine that there were 40 million libertarians in the world ten years ago.' So, he says, 'It's just folly to try to govern cyberspace on the basis of what we're used to.' A key difference: his knife wouldn't work there. 'No. And that's part of why I love my knife. The more time I spend in cyberspace, the more I love the physical world, and any kind of direct, hard-linked interaction with it. I never appreciated the physical world anything like this much before.' Copyright (c) Wendy M. Grossman 1995 *This is the text of the article as submitted, before editing. To quote, please refer to the published version.*