John Perry Barlow has started a blog.
‘Bout time! Thanks John Perry!

I’ve been wary of blogs. Starting a blog looks a little like signing up for treadmill duty. Unless you like to write better than I do – and, personally, I’d rather pump septic tanks – consigning yourself to writing something every day looks like voluntary servitude. Furthermore, when I read some of the discussions on blogs, it looked a little like what you’d get if you invited all of your most socially dysfunctional friends into your living room and gave them plenty of beer.
But then – duh – it dawned on me that I’m under no obligation to post every day. I can continue to write BarlowSpams with my usual infrequency and post them to the blog in addition to sending them directly to you. And there we can discuss them together.
As to the civility of those discussions, there is no reason to think you are as inclined to flame at one another as other blog-posters appear to be. You’re a sweet and relatively civilized lot. I’ve never had to break up a fight at a BarlowFrenzy. Why should I worry about it here? (Actually, there was that party in New York years ago where the anarchists from the Lower East Side went to war with the Italian soccer contingent and they all started throwing hummus at one another, but that seemed unusual….)
Having settled these concerns in my mind, I still didn’t start blogging. There remained the simple matter of inertia and technological surface tension. I knew it couldn’t be that hard to put up a blog. Over a million others have already done it. But I had a hard time getting myself to believe it when I’d tell myself, “This afternoon you should get your blog going, Barlow.”
This is one of the things friends are for. Then, a few days ago, I fell into the too-rare company of my dear pal, Joi Ito, who is like the Blogdom equivalent of Zeus. (Check him out at http://joi.ito.com/.) He sat me down in the lobby of San Francisco’s snotty W Hotel – where there is at least free WiFi coverage – and within a few minutes I had a blog.

SPAM CALLED ON ACCOUNT OF DARKNESS
A funny thing happened to this spam on its way to you. I wrote it Friday afternoon, shortly after setting up my first blog. As usual, I dispatched it to my list-server at EFF, from which it was to be flung around the planet in swarms of magnetic jitter. But very near the time it arrived there, a fire broke out in the P.P.& L. substation in San Francisco’s Mission District, near the Network Operations Center, wherein resides the server that normally flings my spam.
My mail host is also there and I didn’t get any for a few hours – it’s amazing how brief the delay was considering the mess in San Francisco – when it resumed I could see that the following message hadn’t gone out.
I tried a test spam to see if the list-serve was up. No joy. The mail host was still working, albeit through a soda-straw connection, but the list-serve had crashed. And, so doing, it had apparently blasted this message into electronic nothingness.
Or maybe not. I kept thinking the server might come up coughing and spitting, and burp up for the old BarlowSpam just as I was re-sending it in this form. This kept me from resend it until now.
Timing was important though because I was announcing with it the arrival of my new blog, which, as you will read, is intended to be a place for you as much as for me. I posted the following Barlowspam on the blog at the same time I e-mailed it to you. But its subjects, the new BarlowFriendz blog, and my invitations to join me at Tribe.Net and LinkedIn.Com, are already a reality. So, it’s lumpy, but it’s happening…
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HTTP://BLOG.BARLOWFRIENDZ.NET
After skidding through much of last two years on bald tires of unconditional hope, I am starting to feel traction again. The polarity may be about to reverse. New light is perceptible.
Still, things might get worse before they get better, and if I haven’t learned anything else during this dreary passage, I’ve learned that we need each other. I’ve learned that community, in which I’ve always placed great rhetorical value, really does count.
Ironically, I’ve learned this even as I thinned my own belonging in the communities that once sustained me. I have not set foot in the little Wyoming town I still call “home” during calender year. I’ve bounced around the planet, solitary as an ion, as though in Brownian Motion. Though too alone in other ways, I suspect I’m not alone in this.
So I’d like to do more to increase the density of connection with this little community, the BarlowFriendz. Aside from being bound by the one thing you know you have in common, knowing me, you’ve been provided with little opportunity to learn about the many other things you have in common.
Of course, many of you knew each other to begin with, and many, many more have come to know each other through BarlowFrenzies over the years, but you’ve so far had no means of getting generally connected in Cyberspace. My method of communication with you has been generally about as interactive as Rush Limbaugh’s. I broadcast and then take a few calls (or e-mails, as the case may be) which I have not shared.
I’ve often thought about passing them on, because they are usually as wonderful, thoughtful, witty, and intelligent as you are. But I didn’t want to burden you with even more e-mail than you’re already gagging on. It felt selfish not to share such an embarrassment of riches, but I know that if you start getting too much mail from me, you filter it into another mailbox which you never get around to opening. (Maybe this message is sitting just such a black hole now.)
The solution has been obvious for some time: put up a blog. Then, instead of sending your responses to me alone, you can send them to everyone who reads the blog. Of course, personal responses can still be directed to me. (Though please be careful not to include barlowfriendz@eff.org among the recipients. A couple of months ago, I responded to such a message without checking the To: line and dispatched my reply to the entire list. Just in case you were wondering what that was…)
I’ve been wary of blogs. Starting a blog looks a little like signing up for treadmill duty. Unless you like to write better than I do – and, personally, I’d rather pump septic tanks – consigning yourself to writing something every day looks like voluntary servitude. Furthermore, when I read some of the discussions on blogs, it looked a little like what you’d get if you invited all of your most socially dysfunctional friends into your living room and gave them plenty of beer.
But then – duh – it dawned on me that I’m under no obligation to post every day. I can continue to write BarlowSpams with my usual infrequency and post them to the blog in addition to sending them directly to you. And there we can discuss them together.
As to the civility of those discussions, there is no reason to think you are as inclined to flame at one another as other blog-posters appear to be. You’re a sweet and relatively civilized lot. I’ve never had to break up a fight at a BarlowFrenzy. Why should I worry about it here? (Actually, there was that party in New York years ago where the anarchists from the Lower East Side went to war with the Italian soccer contingent and they all started throwing hummus at one another, but that seemed unusual….)
Having settled these concerns in my mind, I still didn’t start blogging. There remained the simple matter of inertia and technological surface tension. I knew it couldn’t be that hard to put up a blog. Over a million others have already done it. But I had a hard time getting myself to believe it when I’d tell myself, “This afternoon you should get your blog going, Barlow.”
This is one of the things friends are for. Then, a few days ago, I fell into the too-rare company of my dear pal, Joi Ito, who is like the Blogdom equivalent of Zeus. (Check him out at http://joi.ito.com/.) He sat me down in the lobby of San Francisco’s snotty W Hotel – where there is at least free WiFi coverage – and within a few minutes I had a blog.
Of course, it’s still a larval thing. I don’t have a great designer’s eye, nor am I fully on top of the tools yet. Worse, I don’t have an instinct for the natural protocols of the medium. Good blog posts are, in my observation, brief and telegraphic. I am orotund and discursive. I do go on. Perhaps I’ll adapt. Perhaps you will.
The main thing is that now we have a place where we can get together between BarlowFrenzies, as well as a place where those of you too far-flung to bring your bodies to a party in Meatspace can get to know each other. We have a place where we can start building a community of ourselves, which, though virtual now, might eventually lead to the real thing. (And, believe me, I do know the difference. Virtual community remains one of my favorite oxymorons.) Still, this feels like it might be a kind of home for us. A home in nowhere, but a home.
Finally, I would like to be better connected with those of you who are already in the Blogosphere. If you’ll send me your own blog URL’s, I’ll link them on my blog. And I hope you will link me on yours. By cross-linking one another, we can generate a more audible collective voice. We can make of ourselves a rich and growing ecosystem of opinion.
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NO DEGREES OF SEPARATION
An ecosystem is an information sorting engine. Whether photons entering a rain forest or heat gradients entering the deep ocean, biological systems pass these differences back and forth among themselves, creating increasingly complex matrices of structure. Hence, Life.
And yet, the most complex information sorting system yet devised by humans, the Internet, remains relatively simple and flat, rather as life was before the Cambrian explosion. Every IP address is like a single celled animal, with larger critters yet to emerge.
I’ve been expecting to see more new forms of order in Cyberspace than I have so far and am always watchful for the substrates of connection that might support it as it emerges. Lately, I’ve been watching sites that seek to narrow and map the famous 6 degrees of separation, like Friendster, Tribes.Net, and LinkedIn.Com.
I’m not entirely sure these things are going anywhere truly interesting, but they are certainly diverting to observe from a sociological standpoint. The former two are like gigantic singles bars for Burning Man refugees, while the latter seems to function largely as a means to reduce professional surface tension between aspiring business types.
It occurs to me, however, that since I am eager to increase the personal connectivity among you BarlowFriendz and give you better opportunities to know one another without passing through me, these sites might be useful to us. (There is already a so-far fairly quiescent BarlowFriendz “tribe” on Tribes.Net.) At least, it feels worthy of an experiment.
So I hope you won’t mind that I’m dumping your addresses into the hopper at all three of these sites just to see what emerges. I don’t think you have worry about your privacy. All of them seem to be scrupulous about not revealing e-mail addresses, personal information, or, in the case, of the first two, actual identities.
You will not be bombarded with e-mail, as you were during the infamous PeopleLink experiment back in 1997. In fairness, that attempt turned out to be headed in an interesting direction, at least. Though flawed in execution, PeopleLink was a forerunner of various instant messaging systems like AIM and Messenger.
(By the way, if you feel like trying real-time chat again, my AIM/iChat handle is barlow1. I don’t have a video camera set up, but I am using iChat AV on a fast line, so we can use voices if you’re similarly enabled. This may prove too distracting, but I will log in for a while and see.)
As I say, this is an experiment. We may find that none of these “social environments” are particularly helpful in bringing us closer together, though, at minimum, we are likely to find ourselves back in touch with people we thought we’d lost (as I already have). Also, since most of you are highly social people, I think if we join together, we can, as a group, find ourselves only a couple of degrees removed from a very large and interesting subset of humanity.
Meanwhile, may your generic holidays be as free of familial dysfunction as possible. May your days be merry and bright, and may Uncle Fred not get too hammered over dinner.
Peace and Light,
Barlow
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John Perry Barlow, Cognitive Dissident
Co-Founder & Vice Chairman, Electronic Frontier Foundation
Berkman Fellow, Harvard Law School
Home(stead) Page: http://www.eff.org/~barlow
Blog: http://blog.barlowfriendz.net
AIM/iChat AV handle: barlow1
Current Cell Phone: 917/863-2037
Current Land Line: 801/582-5035
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Barlow in Meatspace Now: Salt Lake City (Until 12/20) 801/582-5035
(Provisional) Trajectory from Here: Pinedale, Wyoming (12/20-29) -> San Francisco (12/30-1/8) -> Las Vegas (1/8-9) -> New York, New York…
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If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?
— Alexander Solzhenitsyn
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John Perry Barlow, Cognitive Dissident
Co-Founder & Vice Chairman, Electronic Frontier Foundation
Berkman Fellow, Harvard Law School
Home(stead) Page: http://www.eff.org/~barlow
Blog: http://blog.barlowfriendz.net
AIM/iChat AV handle: barlow1