Contemporary Authors

• Mother American Night: My Life and Crazy Times Crown Archetype (New York, NY), 2018

1. Mother American night: my life and crazy times LCCN 2017050430 Type of material Book Personal name Barlow, John P. (John Perry) author. Main title Mother American night: my life and crazy times / John Perry Barlow with Robert Greenfield. Edition First edition. Published/Produced New York : Crown Archetype, [2018] Projected pub date 1806 Description pages cm ISBN 9781524760182 (hardcover) 9781524760199 (trade pbk.)

• New York Times - https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/08/obituaries/john-perry-barlow-internet-champion-dies.html

  John Perry Barlow, 70, Dies; Championed an Unfettered Internet
  Image
  John Perry Barlow during a forum on the internet’s impact on society, held at New York University in 2014.CreditRichard Drew/Associated Press
  By Sam Roberts
  Feb. 8, 2018

  John Perry Barlow, a former cowpoke, Republican politician and lyricist for the Grateful Dead whose affinity for wide open spaces and free expression transformed him into a leading defender of an unfettered internet, died on Wednesday at his home in San Francisco. He was 70.

  His death was confirmed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which he helped found in San Francisco in 1990. No cause was given, but the organization said he had been ailing after a heart attack in 2015.

  At his death, Mr. Barlow was a vice chairman of the foundation, which has been in the vanguard of legal challenges to government constraints on cyberspace — a term he helped popularize in 1990 to describe boundless digital telecommunications networks.

  “There are a lot of similarities between cyberspace and open space,” Mr. Barlow, who was raised on his family’s 22,000-acre cattle ranch in Wyoming, told People magazine in 1995. “There is a lot of room to define yourself. You can literally make yourself up.”

  His plea for an open internet was inspired, in part, by the Grateful Dead’s uncommon practice of welcoming audiences to record the band’s concerts.

  Lawyers recruited or supported by the Electronic Frontier Foundation were instrumental in winning court rulings that granted electronic mail the same privacy protection as telephone calls, and that defined written software code as free speech guaranteed by the First Amendment.

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  The foundation was formed by Mr. Barlow; Mitchell Kapor, the former president of Lotus Development Corporation; and John Gilmore, one of the first employees of Sun Microsystems.

  In 1995, Mr. Kapor called Mr. Barlow “the uncrowned poet laureate of cyberspace.”

  Cindy Cohn, the foundation’s executive director, said in a statement that Mr. Barlow “was sometimes held up as a straw man for a kind of naïve techno-utopianism that believed that the internet could solve all of humanity’s problems without causing any more.”

  But his “lasting legacy,” she said, “is that he devoted his life to making the internet into ‘a world where anyone, anywhere may express his or her beliefs, no matter how singular, without fear of being coerced into silence or conformity.’ ”

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  More than a defender of the internet, Mr. Barlow had many guises in an uneven evolution from an only child whose nearest neighbor lived four miles away to a corporate consultant and citizen of the world.

  Image
  Mr. Barlow spoke at a 2012 rally in Manhattan against proposed internet anti-piracy legislation that opponents said would infringe on online freedom of speech. The legislation never passed.CreditMichael Appleton for The New York Times
  From around 1971 until the Grateful Dead disbanded after the founding member Jerry Garcia’s death in 1995 (though the group periodically reunited in different configurations and under different names for many years after, and performed what were billed as its last concerts in 2015), he wrote lyrics for such well-known songs as “Estimated Prophet,” “Cassidy,” “The Music Never Stopped,” “Mexicali Blues” and “Hell in a Bucket.”

  He contributed to some 30 Grateful Dead songs in all, many with the guitarist and singer Bob Weir, a founding member, and others with the keyboardists Brent Mydland and Vince Welnick, who were later additions to the group.

  Mr. Barlow said he had decided to try his hand at writing lyrics mostly to attract women. “I thought it was a misuse of the holy gift of poetry,” he said. “Then I realized, this is what poetry has always been for.”

  He was born on Oct. 3, 1947, in northwestern Wyoming, near Pinedale, on a ranch that a great-uncle had started in 1907. His parents were Norman Barlow, a Republican state legislator, and the former Miriam Jenkins.

  John attended a one-room elementary school. Brought up in the Mormon faith, he was barred from watching television until he was in the sixth grade.

  As a rambunctious teenager prone to discipline and academic lapses, he was dispatched by his parents to Fountain Valley School in Colorado. He described it as “a great place for people who are intelligent and intractable.”

  He forged a lifelong friendship there with Mr. Weir, a guitar-toting fellow student who would found the Grateful Dead with Mr. Garcia and others in 1965.

  As a student at Wesleyan University in Connecticut, Mr. Barlow took LSD trips with the Harvard psychologist Timothy Leary in Millbrook, N.Y., where Dr. Leary and others were living in a grand Georgian house. He graduated in 1969 with a degree in comparative religion.

  Passing up an opportunity to attend Harvard Law School, Mr. Barlow embarked instead on a journey to India and other destinations to complete a novel, which was never published.

  A memoir, “Mother American Night: My Life in Crazy Times,” which Mr. Barlow wrote with Robert Greenfield, is to be published this year.

  Mr. Barlow joined the Grateful Dead as a nonresident lyricist in the early 1970s. In 1972, after his father died, he returned to Wyoming to manage the family’s debt-ridden ranch, the Bar Cross Land & Livestock Company. (Jaqueline Onassis sent John F. Kennedy Jr. to work as a wrangler there in 1978.) Mr. Barlow remained there for almost 20 years while continuing to contribute lyrics to the Grateful Dead.

  Image

  Mr. Barlow in 1996, a year after the Grateful Dead disbanded. He wrote lyrics for about 30 of the band’s songs.CreditTom LaPoint/Albany Times Union, via Associated Press
  In Wyoming, he was chairman of the Sublette County Republican Party for a time and a coordinator for the 1978 congressional campaign of Dick Cheney, whose conservative politics Mr. Barlow later disavowed.

  His 1977 marriage to Elaine Parker ended in divorce. In 1994 his fiancé, Dr. Cynthia Horner, died suddenly. His survivors include three daughters, Amelia, Anna and Leah, and a granddaughter.

  When Mr. Barlow turned 30, he drew up what he called 25 “Principles of Adult Behavior.” No. 15 was “Avoid the pursuit of happiness. Seek to define your mission and pursue that.”

  His preoccupation with the internet dated from the mid-1980s, when he began using a computer to manage the ranch’s finances. In 1986 he became a director of the WELL (the initials stand for Whole Earth ’Lectronic Link), an online community that drew members from the worlds of music, publishing and technology.

  “On the WELL, he is the No. 1 digital Deadhead, equal parts beat poet and P. T. Barnum,” Craig Bromberg wrote in The New York Times Magazine in 1991.

  Mr. Barlow, an emeritus fellow of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University, was also a founder of the Freedom of the Press Foundation in San Francisco, which promotes adversarial reporting and internet advocacy. The foundation’s president is Edward Snowden, the former government intelligence analyst who leaked secret documents to journalists in 2013.

  Yet for all Mr. Barlow’s internet advocacy, there were limits to his own internet use. He came to complain about feeling “constantly oppressed by all of the beeping and buzzing and whining” of computers, and by “discussion groups on the net, which I found very easy to leave once the signal-to-noise ratio deteriorated to the point where I didn’t dig it any more.”

  Still, in 1996 he issued a declaration of independence for — not from — the internet.

  It proclaimed: “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.”

  He championed not only a right to speak freely on the web but also what he called “a right to know” all the information that it offers. And he endorsed the creation of communities through encounters in cyberspace.

  But he warned against “the modern plague of boredom,” which he attributed to society’s desire to homogenize human experience, from fast food to television.

  “I remember one of the few truly Buddhist things that my very non-Buddhist Wyoming mother said to me when I was little,” he told the social theorist bell hooks in 1995 on lionsroar .com, a Buddhist website. “I’d complain about being bored and she’d say, ‘Anyone who’s bored isn’t paying close enough attention.’ ”

  A version of this article appears in print on Feb. 8, 2018, on Page B14 of the New York edition with the headline: John Perry Barlow, 70, Champion of an Open Internet, Dies. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

• Wikipedia - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Perry_Barlow

  John Perry Barlow
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  John Perry Barlow
  John Perry Barlow 2012.jpg
  Barlow in August 2012
  Born October 3, 1947
  near Cora, Wyoming, U.S.
  Died February 7, 2018 (aged 70)
  San Francisco, California, U.S.
  Occupation
  Lyricist essayist
  Alma mater Wesleyan University
  Period 1971–95 (lyrics)
  1990–2018 (essays)
  Subject Internet (essays)
  John Perry Barlow (October 3, 1947 – February 7, 2018) was an American poet and essayist, a cattle rancher, and a cyberlibertarian[1] political activist who had been associated with both the Democratic and Republican parties. He was also a lyricist for the Grateful Dead and a founding member of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Freedom of the Press Foundation. He was Fellow Emeritus at Harvard University's Berkman Center for Internet and Society, where he had maintained an affiliation since 1998.[2]

  Contents
  1 Early life and education
  2 Career
  2.1 Grateful Dead
  2.2 Internet activism
  2.3 Writing
  2.4 Politics
  2.5 Later work
  3 Personal life
  3.1 Death
  4 References
  5 Bibliography
  6 External links
  Early life and education
  Barlow was born near Cora, Wyoming,[3] as the only child to Norman Walker Barlow (1905–1972),[4][5] a Republican state legislator, and his wife, Miriam "Mim" Adeline Barlow Bailey (née Jenkins; 1905–1999),[6] who married in 1929.[7]

  Barlow's paternal ancestors were Mormon pioneers.[7] He grew up on Bar Cross Ranch near Pinedale, Wyoming, a 22,000-acre (8,900 ha) property founded by his great uncle in 1907, and attended elementary school in a one-room schoolhouse. Raised as a "devout Mormon", he was prohibited from watching television until the sixth grade, when his parents allowed him to "absorb televangelists".[8][9]

  Although Barlow's academic record was erratic throughout his secondary education, he "had his pick of top eastern universities... simply because he was from Wyoming, where few applications originated."[10] In 1969, he graduated with high honors in comparative religion from Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut. He served as the University's student body president until the administration "tossed him into a sanitarium" following a drug-induced attempted suicide attack in Boston, Massachusetts.[8][10] Following two weeks of rehabilitation, he successfully returned to his studies.[10]

  Prior to receiving his degree, Barlow was admitted to Harvard Law School and contracted to write a novel by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Initially supported by a $5,000 advance from the publisher,[10] he decided to eschew these options in favor of spending the next two years traveling around the world, including a nine-month sojourn in India, a riotous winter in a summer cottage on Long Island Sound in Connecticut,[11] and a screenwriting foray in Los Angeles. Barlow eventually finished the novel, but it remains unpublished.[9][12] During this period, he also "lived beside Needle Park on New York's Upper West Side and dealt cocaine in Spanish Harlem."[10]

  Career
  Grateful Dead
  At age 15, Barlow became a student at the Fountain Valley School in Colorado Springs, Colorado. While there, he met Bob Weir, who would later join the jam band the Grateful Dead. Weir and Barlow maintained their close friendship through the years. As a frequent visitor during college to Timothy Leary's facility in Millbrook, New York, Barlow was introduced to LSD; he would go on to consume the substance on over one thousand occasions throughout his life.[10] As a result of his transformative experiences, Barlow distanced himself from Mormonism and facilitated the first meeting between the musical group and Leary (who recognized each other as kindred souls in spite of their respective philosophical approaches) in June 1967.[13]

  While on his way to California to reunite with the Grateful Dead in 1971, he stopped at his family's ranch, though had not intended to stay. His father had suffered a debilitating stroke in 1966 before dying in 1972, resulting in a $700,000 business debt. Barlow ended up changing his plans, and began practicing animal husbandry under the auspices of the Bar Cross Land and Livestock Company in Cora, Wyoming, for almost two decades. To support the ranch, he continued to write and sell spec scripts.[10] In the meantime, Barlow was still able to play an active role in the Grateful Dead while recruiting many unconventional part-time ranch hands from the mainstream as well as the counterculture.[14] Prior to his death in 2017, John Byrne Cooke intended to produce a documentary film (provisionally titled The Bar Cross Ranch) that documented this era.[15]

  Barlow orating at the European Graduate School of Leuk, Switzerland in 2006
  Barlow became interested in collaborating with Weir at a Grateful Dead show at the Capitol Theatre in Port Chester, New York, in February 1971. Until then, Weir had mostly worked with resident Dead lyricist Robert Hunter. Hunter preferred that those who sang his songs stick to his "canonical" lyrics rather than improvising additions or rearranging words. A feud erupted backstage over a couplet in "Sugar Magnolia" from the band's most recent release (most likely "She can dance a Cajun rhythm/Jump like a Willys in four-wheel drive"), culminating in a disgruntled Hunter summoning Barlow and telling him "take [Weir]—he's yours".[16]

  In late 1971, with a deal for a solo album in hand and only two songs completed, Weir and Barlow began to write together for the first time. They co-wrote such songs such as "Cassidy", "Mexicali Blues" and "Black-Throated Wind", all three of which would remain in the repertoires of the Grateful Dead and of Weir's varied solo projects.[17] Barlow subsequently collaborated with Grateful Dead keyboardist Brent Mydland, a partnership that culminated in four songs on 1989's Built to Last. He also wrote one song ("The Devil I Know") with Vince Welnick.[18]

  Internet activism

  Barlow with Nicholas Negroponte
  In 1986, Barlow joined The WELL, an online community then known for a strong Deadhead presence. He served on the company's board of directors for several years.[19] In 1990, Barlow founded the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) along with fellow digital-rights activists John Gilmore and Mitch Kapor.[20]

  As a founder of EFF, Barlow helped publicize the Secret Service raid on Steve Jackson Games. His involvement is later documented in The Hacker Crackdown: Law and Disorder on the Electronic Frontier (1992) by Bruce Sterling.[21] EFF later sponsored the ground-breaking case Steve Jackson Games, Inc. v. United States Secret Service in support of Steve Jackson Games. Steve Jackson Games won the case in 1993.[22]

  In 1996, Barlow was invited to speak about his work in cyberspace to a middle school classroom at North Shore Country Day School. This event was highly influential upon the life of then-student Aaron Swartz: Swartz's father Robert recalls Aaron coming home that day a changed person.[23][24]

  In 2003, Barlow met the recently appointed Brazilian Minister of Culture Gilberto Gil at the event Tactic Media Brazil to discuss the perspectives of digital inclusion and political participation, which in the following years would help shape Brazilian governmental policy on intellectual property and digital media.[25][26]

  In 2004, the two began working together to expand the availability and variety of Brazilian music to remix and share online. At the same time, being one of the "digerati", Barlow was among the very first users of the invitation-only social network Orkut at its inception. He decided to send all of his 100 invitations to friends in Brazil; two years later, some 11 million internet users in that country (out of 14 million total) were on the social network.[27]

  Writing
  From 1971 to 1995, Barlow wrote lyrics for the Grateful Dead, mostly through his relationship with Bob Weir. Barlow's songs include "Cassidy" (about Neal Cassady and Cassidy Law),[28] "Estimated Prophet", "Black-Throated Wind", "Hell in a Bucket", "Mexicali Blues", "The Music Never Stopped" and "Throwing Stones".

  Barlow wrote extensively for Wired magazine, as well as The New York Times, Nerve, and Communications of the ACM. In his writings, he explained the wonder of the Internet. The Internet to him was more than a computer network; he called it an "electronic frontier."[1] "He frequently wrote in language that echoed Henry Morton Stanley's African diary. 'Imagine discovering a continent so vast that it may have no end to its dimensions. Imagine a new world with more resources than all our future greed might exhaust, more opportunities than there will ever be entrepreneurs enough to exploit, and a peculiar kind of real estate that expands with development. Imagine a place where trespassers leave no footprints, where goods can be stolen infinite number of times and yet remain in the possession of their original owners, where business you never heard of can own the history of your personal affairs.'"[29]

  His writings include "A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace", which was written in response to the enactment of the Communications Decency Act in 1996 as the EFF saw the law as a threat to the independence and sovereignty of cyberspace. He argued that the cyberspace legal order would reflect the ethical deliberation of the community instead of the coercive power that characterized real-space governance.[30] Since online "identities have no bodies", they found it inappropriate to obtain order in the cyberspace by physical coercion.[31] Instead, ethics, enlightened self-interest and the commonwealth were the elements they believed to create a civilization of the Mind in Cyberspace.[30]

  In his 1990 piece "Crime and Puzzlement: in advance of the law on the electronic frontier", Barlow wrote about his first-hand experience with Phiber Optik (Mark Abene) and Acid Phreak (Elias Ladopoulos) from the hacker group Masters of Deception, and mentioned Kevin Mitnick—all of whom were engaged in phone phreaking.[32] The title alludes to Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky.[33]

  Barlow is credited with popularizing of the concept of pronoia (defined as the opposite of paranoia) and was considered a celebrity ally of the Zippy Pronoia Tour in 1994.[34][35]

  In 1998, Barlow wrote the article "Africa Rising: Everything You Know About Africa Is Wrong" for Wired, which documented the start of his extensive travels as he worked to expand Internet access across the continent: "I went from Mombasa to Tombouctou, experiencing various parts of Kenya, Ghana, the Ivory Coast, Mali, Uganda, and the Virunga volcano area where Uganda, Rwanda, and the Congo meet. Part of the idea was that I would attempt to email Wired a series of dispatches on my travels. The act of finding a port into cyberspace would be part of the adventure… Before I left, I believed Africans could proceed directly from the agricultural epoch into an information economy without having to submit to the dreary indignities and social pathologies of industrialization."[36]

  Barlow also returned to writing lyrics, most recently with The String Cheese Incident's mandolinist and vocalist Michael Kang, including their song "Desert Dawn". Barlow was seen many times with Carolyn Garcia (whose monologue is dubbed on the eponymous track "Mountain Girl"[37]) at their concerts mixing with the fans and members in the band, and was a close friend of String Cheese Incident producer Jerry Harrison. He also participated with the Chicago-based jam band Mr. Blotto on their release Barlow Shanghai. Barlow was a spiritual mentor and student of Kemp Muhl and Sean Lennon,[38] collaborating with their band The Ghost of a Saber Tooth Tiger and making a cameo in their 2014 music video "Animals."[39]

  One of Barlow's writings that has remained in circulation is his "Principles of Adult Behavior", which he penned in 1977 on the eve of his 30th birthday and which he continued to use to describe his approach to life.[40][41] He described his reason for writing these as he was about to enter adulthood, "my wariness of the pursuit of happiness might be a subtle form of treason".[42] While he considered most of the twenty-five statements to be similar to platitudes that Polonius gave to Prince Hamlet, the fifteenth caught attention, "Avoid the pursuit of happiness. Seek to define your mission and pursue that.", since that was counter to prevailing thought and "un-American". Barlow saw this more as a way to challenge how one perceived their life, their job, and their goals in life, and to not see achieving happiness as "an obligation [one owes] to Jefferson, the United States, or God Itself".[42]

  Politics
  Barlow was a former chairman of the Sublette County Republican Party, and served as western Wyoming campaign coordinator for Dick Cheney during his 1978 Congressional campaign. Although he had lauded Cheney as "the smartest man I've ever met [with] the possible exception of Bill Gates", Barlow subsequently renounced Cheney prior to his Vice Presidency, owing to his perceived repudiation of environmental and civil-rights issues in Congress. Barlow opined that "Dick's votes… were parts of complex deals aimed at enhancing his own power… [H]e has the least interest in human beings of anyone I have ever met."[43][44]

  Barlow was president of the Wyoming Outdoor Council from 1978 to 1984. He was chairman of the Sublette County Master Plan Design Commission and served on the Sublette County Planning and Zoning Commission for many years; in the latter capacity, he was one of five ranchers who administered water distribution in the New Fork Irrigation District, an area of nearly 100,000 acres serving about 35 ranchers.[45]

  By the early 2000s, Barlow was unable to reconcile his ardent libertarianism with the prevailing neoconservative movement, and "didn't feel tempted to vote for Bush"; in 2004, he said that he was "voting for John Kerry, though with little enthusiasm".[46] Contemporaneously, he characterized cocaine derogatorily as a "Republican drug" that "makes its users self-obsessed, aggressive, and greedy".[47] However, Barlow subsequently declared that he remained a Republican, most notably during an appearance on The Colbert Report on March 26, 2007,[48][49] and also claimed on many occasions to be an anarchist.[50]

  Barlow said he voted for Natural Law Party Presidential candidate John Hagelin in 2000 after discovering in the voting booth that his friend Nat Goldhaber was Hagelin's running mate.[46] He said in 2004: "I'm embarrassed for my country that in my entire voting life, there has never been a major-party candidate whom I felt I could vote for. All of my presidential votes, whether for George Wallace, Dick Gregory, or John Hagelin, have been protest votes."[46] Barlow condemned Donald Trump in November 2016, characterizing him as a "thorough creep" and "toxic asshole" in a Facebook "micromanifesto".[51]

  Later work
  Barlow, until his death, served on the EFF's board of directors, where he was listed as a co-founder after previously serving as vice chairman.[52] The EFF was designed to mediate the "inevitable conflicts that have begun to occur on the border between Cyberspace and the physical world". They were trying to build a legal wall that would separate and protect the Internet from territorial government, and especially from the US government.[53]

  In 2012, Barlow was one of the founders of the EFF-related Freedom of the Press Foundation and also served on its board of directors until his death.[54] Barlow had several public conversations via video conference with fellow Freedom of the Press Foundation Board of Directors member Edward Snowden,[55][56] and has appeared in interviews with Julian Assange of WikiLeaks touting Snowden as "a Hero".[57]

  A Fellow Emeritus of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School, past member of the advisory board of Diamond Management & Technology Consultants (1994–2008),[58] and a member of the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences, Barlow was previously affiliated with the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland as a "professor of cyberspace".[59]

  In the final years of his life, he spent much of his time on the road, lecturing about and consulting on civil rights, freedom of speech, the state of the internet and the Electronic Frontier Foundation. He delivered lectures and panel discussions at TWiT Live,[60] TedxHamburg, Hamburg (Germany),[61] Greenfest SF,[62] Civitas (Norwegian think tank),[63] Internet Society (NY Chapter, New York),[64] the USC Center on Public Diplomacy,[65] and the European Graduate School.[66] On September 16, 2012, he was a presenter at TEDxSantaCruz,[clarification needed] in Santa Cruz, California.[67]

  On September 8, 2014, Barlow was the first speaker in the Art, Activism, and Technology: The 50th Anniversary of the Free Speech Movement colloquium series at University of California, Berkeley.[68]

  Barlow also served on the advisory boards of the Marijuana Policy Project,[69] Clear Path International, TTI/Vanguard, the Hypothes.is project,[70] the stakeholder engagement non-profit Future 500 and the global company Touch Light Media[71] founded by Anita Ondine. He was a collaborator on the WetheData project founded by Juliette Powell.[72]

  He was listed as Vice President at Algae Systems, a Nevada-based company with a working demo-scale pilot plant in Daphne, Alabama, dedicated to commercializing novel methods at the water-energy nexus for growing microalgae offshore as a second-generation biofuels feedstock and converting it to useful crude via hydrothermal liquefaction, while simultaneously treating wastewater, reducing carbon dioxide in Earth's atmosphere, and producing biochar.[73]

  At Startup Grind Jackson Hole on March 13, 2015, Barlow said that he was motivated to team up with Algae Systems after undergoing back surgery to address pain from an old ranching injury, while he had been an advisor to Herb Allison (president of Merrill Lynch at the time) and working to completely "electronify" financial transactions and speculative asset assembly Barlow was named "One of the 25 Most Influential People in Financial Services" in the June 1999 issue of FutureBanker Magazine.[74]

  The surgery successfully alleviated the pain and catalyzed Barlow to change his focus from building wealth to building infrastructure in order to do something about the "amount of alterations we are already enacting on Planet Earth… We are not necessarily making it warmer, but weirder." At Startup Grind Jackson Hole, Barlow also explained how once over tea with "Grandmother of the Conservation Movement" Mardy Murie, he was inspired by her words, "Environmentalists can be a pain in the ass… But they make great ancestors." Adopting this philosophy, he stated, "I want to be a good ancestor."[75]

  Barlow serving as wedding minister at Mount Tamalpais on July 11, 2014
  For several years, Barlow attended Burning Man. In 2013, he led a town hall meeting with Burning Man co-founder Larry Harvey about "the current state [o]f Practical Anarchy at Burning Man".[76][77]

  Wesley Clark caused a stir in the media when he attended Burning Man in 2013 and spent time with Barlow and Harvey.[78]

  Barlow appeared in many films and television shows, both as an actor and as himself. Interviews with Barlow have been featured in documentaries such as the Tao Ruspoli-directed film Monogamish (under production),[79] Bits & Bytes (under production),[80] and Dying to Know: Ram Dass & Timothy Leary.[81]

  The iPhone app Detour, released in February 2015 by Groupon founder and ex-CEO Andrew Mason, features a 75-minute audio tour narrated by Barlow as he walks through the Tenderloin neighborhood in downtown San Francisco.[82][83][84]

  Barlow was also a self-ordained minister who performed baptisms and weddings.[85][86]

  Barlow's memoir, Mother American Night: My Life in Crazy Times, will be published posthumously in June 2018. Written with Robert Greenfield, it is a full length retelling of his life and times. The book was completed shortly before Barlow's death in February.[87]

  Personal life

  Barlow's Maine Coon cat, Buck
  He married Elaine Parker Barlow in 1977,[4] and the couple had three daughters: Amelia Rose, Anna Winter, and Leah Justine.[88] Elaine and John separated in 1992 and officially divorced in 1995. In 2002, he helped his friend realtor/entrepreneur/[89] model[90]/actress Simone Banos deliver her daughter Emma Victoria, who became his surrogate daughter henceforth.[91][92]

  He was engaged to Cynthia Horner, a doctor whom he met in 1993 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco while she was attending a psychiatry conference and Barlow was participating in a Steve Jobs comedy roast at a convention for the NeXT Computer. She died unexpectedly in 1994 while asleep on a flight from Los Angeles to New York City, days before her 30th birthday, from a heart arrhythmia apparently caused by undetected viral myocarditis. Barlow describes this period in his life in the This American Life episode "Conventions", from August 29, 1997.[93]

  Barlow had been a good friend and mentor to John F. Kennedy Jr., ever since his mother Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis had made arrangements for her troublesome son to be a wrangler at the Bar Cross Ranch for six months in 1978. The two men later went on many double dates in New York City with Kennedy's then-girlfriend Daryl Hannah[94] and Cynthia.[95]

  In his piece "A Ladies' Man and Shameless", Barlow professed his love of many women at the same time, and summarized the relationships in his personal life, "I doubt I'll ever be monogamous again… I want to know as many more women as time and their indulgence will permit me… There are probably twenty-five or thirty women—I certainly don't count them—for whom I feel an abiding and deep emotional attachment. They're scattered all over the planet. They range in age from less than half to almost twice my own. Most of these relationships are not actively sexual. Some were at one time. More never will be. But most of them feel as if they could become so. I love the feel of that tension, the delicious gravity of possibilities."[96]

  Barlow was a friend and former roommate[97] of the technology entrepreneur Sean Parker.

  In 2014, Barlow suffered the loss of Buck, his beloved Maine Coon cat that he believed to be a bodhisattva;[98] the cat had many fans on social media.[99]

  After a series of illnesses, Barlow suffered a near-fatal heart attack on May 27, 2015. He later reported that he was recovering.[100] Following a "prolonged hospitalization" for Barlow, the John Perry Barlow Wellness Fund was established in October 2016 to allay outstanding medical bills and "provide the quality and consistency of care that is critical to Barlow's recovery as he faces a variety of debilitating health conditions", including "extremely compromised mobility".[101] A concert held on October 11, 2016 to benefit the fund at Sweetwater Music Hall in Mill Valley, California, featured Weir, Ramblin' Jack Elliott, Jerry Harrison, Les Claypool, Robin Sylvester, Jeff Chimenti, Steve Kimock, Sean Lennon, Lukas Nelson, and members of The String Cheese Incident.[102]

  Death
  Wikinews has related news: Poet, lyricist, and digital activist John Perry Barlow dies, aged 70
  Barlow died in his sleep on the night of February 7, 2018 at his San Francisco home, at the age of 70.[103][104][105]

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Print Marked Items
Barlow, John Perry: MOTHER
AMERICAN NIGHT
Kirkus Reviews.
(Apr. 15, 2018):
COPYRIGHT 2018 Kirkus Media LLC
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Full Text:
Barlow, John Perry MOTHER AMERICAN NIGHT Crown Archetype (Adult Nonfiction) $27.00 6, 5
ISBN: 978-1-5247-6018-2
Wondrous tales of the hippie highway by Grateful Dead lyricist and internet pioneer Barlow.
The author died recently after a long series of illnesses that form a moody counterpart to the general
anarchist fun of his memoir. That may be a good thing considering that the statute of limitations may not yet
have run out for various of the hijinks he recounts here. The son of a prominent Wyoming rancher, Barlow
was packed off to a Colorado prep school, where he met a classmate named Bob Weir, later to become
renowned as a Dead's guitarist and singer. Later, at Wesleyan, Barlow came into the orbit of Timothy Leary,
who inducted him into the mysteries of LSD. These and many other confluences make for the narrative
bones of a story that the author tells with zest and no small amount of self-congratulation--in part for having
survived where so many others fell, such as pal Neal Cassady, who died of exposure in Mexico. "Exposure
seemed right to me," writes Barlow. "He had lived an exposed life. By then, it was beginning to feel like we
all had." A lysergic pioneer, Barlow initiated young John F. Kennedy Jr. into the cult; had the young man
not died in a plane crash, as Barlow warned him it was all too easy to do, he might have changed the shape
of American politics. The author was steeped in politics, renegade though he might have been; he was a
friend of Sen. Alan Simpson, a sometime associate of Dick Cheney, and a confidant of Jackie Kennedy. The
storyline is a bit of a mess, but so was Barlow's life, the latter part of which was devoted to internet-related
concerns. But he writes with rough grace and considerable poetic power, as when he describes a 1993
Prince concert: "the place was full of all these bridge and tunnel people who were swaying in their seats like
kelp in a mild swell."
A yarn to read, with pleasure, alongside Ringolevio and The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Barlow, John Perry: MOTHER AMERICAN NIGHT." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Apr. 2018. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A534375150/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=6c15cf10.
Accessed 15 July 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A534375150
7/15/2018 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1531689249458 2/2

"Barlow, John Perry: MOTHER AMERICAN NIGHT." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Apr. 2018. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A534375150/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF. Accessed 15 July 2018.

• Boing Boing
  https://boingboing.net/2018/06/21/grateful-dead.html
  Word count: 1159

  John Perry Barlow lived many lives: small-time Wyoming Republican operative (and regional campaign director for Dick Cheney!), junior lyricist for the Grateful Dead, father-figure to John Kennedy Jr, co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, inspirational culture hero for the likes of Aaron Swartz and Ed Snowden (and, not incidentally, me), semi-successful biofuels entrepreneur... He died this year, shortly after completing his memoir Mother American Night, and many commenters have noted that Barlow comes across as a kind of counterculture cyberculture Zelig, present at so many pivotal moments in our culture, and that's true, but that's not what I got from my read of the book -- instead, I came to know someone I counted as a friend much better, and realized that every flaw and very virtue he exhibited in his interpersonal dealings stemmed from the flaws and virtues of his relationship with himself.
  The first thing I noticed in reading Mother American Night was Barlow's voice. Literally. I listened to the audiobook, ably read by Ray Porter. When I started listening, I thought, That guy sounds a little like Barlow, but it's not like he's doing impressions or anything.. Ten minutes later, I was like, "Holy shit, the ghost of John Perry Barlow is in my earbuds." It wasn't Porter's voice so much as Barlow's words -- his incredibly gift with language, combined with his habit of manicuring his anaecdotes to a carefully calculated rough-hewn perfection, shining through with unmistakable glory. Barlow is one of the world's great storytellers, and his ability to spin a yarn was one of the secrets of his success, letting him tunnel through his readers' eyeballs and straight into their brains, grabbing them and winning them over to his team, and then to his team's cause.

  The second thing I notice about Mother American Night was that Barlow was sure settling a lot of scores in the early chapters. Sure, we were meeting his parents and various Republican operators and the Dead and their retinue and experiencing them in all their variegated virtues and failings, but Barlow also had some sharp knives for those (mostly) long-dead friends and relatives, and he wasn't afraid to slip them in. Barlow's barbs have the air of long-mulled grievances, honed to perfection, waiting for an opportune moment to be unsheathed.

  As beautifully turned as his phrases were in these early chapters, as much as he made you feel these half-century-old disappointments and sorrows, they also felt...unworthy. Petty, even.

  And then Barlow drops the other shoe: while in one chapter he might be excoriating his father or Bob Weir or Jerry Garcia, a couple chapters later he's revisiting them with enormous affection -- often spilling details that are every bit as intimate and revealing as the dirt he had revealed a few chapters back. He lands these one-two punches with incredible grace and insight, and it changes the whole nature of the enterprise, from a well-told memoir with some bits in dubious taste to a revelation about Barlow's enormous affection for the people in his life -- not despite their myriad failings, but because of them.

  Then the other other shoe drops: because Barlow is meting out the same treatment to himself that he's subjecting everyone else in the Barlowsphere to. He's incredibly hard on himself, and also fully aware of his prodigious virtues and accomplishments. His treatment of himself is just as uneven (and sometimes unfair) as his treatment of everyone else is: some sins that shouldn't be readily forgiven are swept under the rug (in himself and others, Barlow is extremely willing to forgive sexual objectification, provided it is carried off with some kind of panache) while other human frailties are held up as examples of moral failings. Barlow's writing in a very brave and very revelatory way here.

  Though Barlow dwells on the highs and lows of many famous personages here, the most incredible (literal) bombshells are not celebrity gossip: they're things about Barlow that he never revealed to a soul -- for example, that he once planned and nearly executed a suicide bomb attack on Harvard Square with the intention of awakening people to a kind of unnameable dread that he believes was the motivation for Charles Manson (even more incredibly, he says that the administration at Wesleyan -- who headed him off before he could blow himself up and commit mass murder -- hushed up the whole incident, stuck him in an institution on thorazine for a couple of weeks, then let him finish the school year with no further incident).

  Other reviewers have discussed the details of Barlow's memoir-- the tragic loss of his true love, a woman who died of an unsuspected genetic disorder during a transcontinental flight, his brief dalliance with Anita Hill, and more. I found these stories fascinating; I had been on the periphery of many of them, encountering Barlow in various locales around the world and getting fragmentary versions of the story (we once slowly traversed the width of Black Rock City while he explained his intention to start a second family with a young woman he planned to marry) -- getting the polished, final versions, with the punchlines that hadn't happened yet, made the whole Barlow situation a lot more linear and causal.

  But for all that this is an essential, beautifully written book that is full of humor and tragedy and revelation, it's not perfect. As it reaches its final act -- everything from the founding of EFF onward -- it takes on a rushed aspect. Barlow was dying by then, and may have known that he was running out of time, or it may just be that the earlier material had been polished by many repetitions by one of the world's great raconteurs. I would have liked to hear as much about Ed Snowden as I did about despicable roadies for the Grateful Dead, and if Barlow were alive today and I was his editor, I'd tell him to add 25% to this book by fleshing out the last 25% of his life.

  But Barlow's dead, and hardly a day goes by that I don't think of him. Listening to this audiobook made me feel like I was walking the playa with him again, spinning out stories, debating, laughing, catching him defaulting to gnomic utterances when he started losing an argument and calling him on it, to his enormous delight... I miss him very much, and I'm so glad that he left us this book; it makes me sad to learn that he was as hard on himself as he was, and also happy to know that in his clearer moments, he knew just how much he meant to all of his friends.

  Mother American Night: My Life in Crazy Times Hardcover [John Perry Barlow and Robert Greenfield/Crown]

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• First To Read
  http://www.firsttoread.com/Books/BookDetails.aspx?id=938925&rid=7235d1ec-659f-43ee-b95e-e8d7e3dee52f&st=2
  Word count: 327

  Mother American Night
  John Perry Barlow with Robert Greenfield

  Mother American Night traces the generational passage by which the counterculture became the culture in this wild, funny and heartbreaking story of John Perry Barlow.

  John Perry Barlow’s wild ride with the Grateful Dead was just part of a Zelig-like life that took him from a childhood as ranching royalty in Wyoming to membership in the Internet Hall of Fame as a digital free speech advocate.

  Mother American Night is the wild, funny, heartbreaking, and often unbelievable (yet completely true) story of an American icon. Born into a powerful Wyoming political family, John Perry Barlow wrote the lyrics for thirty Grateful Dead songs while also running his family’s cattle ranch. He hung out in Andy Warhol’s Factory, went on a date with the Dalai Lama’s sister, and accidentally shot Bob Weir in the face on the eve of his own wedding. As a favor to Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Barlow mentored a young JFK Jr. and the two then became lifelong friends. Despite being a freely self-confessed acidhead, he served as Dick Cheney’s campaign manager during Cheney’s first run for Congress. And after befriending a legendary early group of computer hackers known as the Legion of Doom, Barlow became a renowned internet guru who then cofounded the groundbreaking Electronic Frontier Foundation.

  His résumé only hints of the richness of a life lived on the edge. Blessed with an incredible sense of humor and a unique voice, Barlow was a born storyteller in the tradition of Mark Twain and Will Rogers. Through intimate portraits of friends and acquaintances from Bob Weir and Jerry Garcia to Timothy Leary and Steve Jobs, Mother American Night traces the generational passage by which the counterculture became the culture, and it shows why learning to accept love may be the hardest thing we ever ask of ourselves.

• Wired
  https://www.wired.com/story/the-ghost-of-john-perry-barlow-lives-in-his-posthumous-memoir/
  Word count: 2977

  John Perry Barlow's memoir captures the trippy contradictions of a mind that helped invent the futureANN E. YOW-DYSON/GETTY IMAGES
  BACKCHANNEL
  06.05.1804:34 PM
  THE GHOST OF JOHN PERRY BARLOW LIVES IN HIS POSTHUMOUS MEMOIR
  Mother American Night will become the crucial document for understanding the trippy, contradictory life and work of the internet pioneer and Grateful Dead lyricist.

  AUTHOR: JESSE JARNOWBY JESSE JARNOW
  IN THE MID-1980S, John Perry Barlow tried to follow his father into the Wyoming state senate, losing the election by one vote. But Barlow—cofounder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and “junior lyricist” for the Grateful Dead—became a statesman anyway, if such a term can be applied to the borderless territory he made his home.

  When Barlow died in February at age 70, remembrances came from United States senators and exiled dissidents, hackers and psychedelics enthusiasts, Harvard fellows and members of the Grateful Dead. Founding WIRED executive editor Kevin Kelly called him “the mayor of the internet.” Edward Snowden’s eulogy suggested that Barlow may have provided the seed of his own radicalization.

  Mother American Night, a newly published posthumous memoir cowritten with Robert Greenfield, tells of Barlow’s journey from rural, Mormon Wyoming to the virtual domain that he was—in 1990—the first to call cyberspace, after the term from William Gibson’s Neuromancer. As Barlow surely would have noted, the scope of those remembering him demonstrated exactly the sentiment he was trying to express: The emerging internet was—and is—a place.

  From this observation materialized Barlow’s career as one of the network’s most eloquent theorizers. If not an architect of the internet in the technical sense, Barlow’s gonzo dispatches—most especially 1996’s “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace”—began to imagine and articulate unfolding new dimensions of politics, economics, privacy, and public commons. Though his lyrics for the Grateful Dead will surely survive as long as there is an internet, his legacy as a cyber theorist is inevitably more complicated, and well worth consideration.

  Breezy, connected by ceaselessly mind-blowing anecdotes, and bubbling over with psychedelic wisdom, Mother American Night will become the crucial document for understanding the life and work of the internet pioneer and Dead collaborator. The fun is infectious. He’s introducing Timothy Leary to the Grateful Dead! He’s working in Andy Warhol’s Factory! He’s taking acid with JFK Jr. and Daryl Hannah! He’s roasting Steve Jobs! He’s dating Anita Hill! It would be name-dropping if Barlow himself weren’t so fascinating and his observations so incisive.

  “Steve [Jobs] made you care about what he thought of you, and even though you could pretend that you didn’t, you were kidding yourself,” Barlow writes. “It was a quality [Jerry] Garcia had as well,” Barlow muses, perhaps the only person on the planet qualified to draw those comparisons from personal experience. It was a life lived at scale.

  AMID ALL THE celebrity hobnobbing, Mother American Night remains resiliently idea-filled. A Wyoming cattle rancher, Barlow recalls his thrill at discovering the internet for the first time. “I had spent 15 years riding around the [ranch] thinking about [Teilhard de Chardin’s concept of a consciousness-created] noosphere, and suddenly after all that time, I had evidence this was not just Teilhard’s pipe dream but was in fact real and growing its own nervous system.”

  “Find the others,” Barlow’s one-time guru Timothy Leary had instructed, those untapped minds already part of the same cause, consciously or not. When Barlow set out to do that on the unsettled electronic horizon, he perhaps didn’t realize that he was about to find all the others, give or take those who might stay off the grid altogether (and he might run into them at Dead shows anyway). Even as the internet transformed the analog world that Barlow called meatspace, cyberspace would remain a virtual domain of its own, growing at least as big as the world that spawned it, and definitely stranger.

  A lifelong storyteller and self-mythologizer, Barlow was also a natural-born politician. But the specifics of those politics continue to remain singular and often undefinable. Running on charisma as much as policy, but with seemingly equal grasp of both, Barlow was perhaps less an influencer than an instigator. With an instinct for freedom honed as much on the psychedelic planes as the Wyoming frontier, Barlow’s personality rings big and weird throughout Mother American Night, as open-hearted as it was sometimes privileged.

  For all his self-importance, though, there really was no one else quite like John Perry Barlow. Just as the Grateful Dead carried the psychedelic revolution with them, Barlow was his own kind of catalyzing agent. Encountering the father of the late internet activist Aaron Swartz, Swartz’s father tells Barlow about the impact the EFF’s cofounder had when he visited the 10-year-old Swartz’s elementary school class. “His life was different after that,” Robert Swartz tells Barlow.

  But as accessible and generous as Barlow was in his writing and life—with his phone numbers and messenger handles posted publicly—he still remains elusive, somehow hard to pin down in Mother American Night. Instead of resolving Barlow’s apparent contradictions, the book lays them out in nearly parable-like fashion.

  Barlow, seemingly was everywhere and knew everyone. Following his 1969 graduation from Wesleyan, he—like many of his peers—would trek to India. “I was not on a spiritual pilgrimage in India,” he emphasizes, however. “Instead, I was doing what I always do, which was hanging out with intent.” It is the kind of self-congratulatory self-assessment that can sometimes make Barlow sound like a caricature from Silicon Valley, especially when he mentions that, oh yeah, he took the Dalai Lama’s younger sister out on a few dates.

  Barlow says he “came back a different person,” because: of course. Where Barlow’s story veers from many hippie icons, however, is his conclusion that he now “could more plainly see the virtues of being more of a Republican than I had been.” Barlow may have been the only acid-head to hang out on an Indian mountaintop with a Lama, and come back resolving to vote for the party of Richard Nixon. But Barlow wasn’t just any head.

  The son of multiple generations of cattle-ranching Wyoming Republican Mormons, Barlow says the chaos he saw in India reinforced his belief that the United States was en route to its own kind of spiritual and political collapse. (It didn’t stop him from bringing back a life-size Buddha head stuffed with hashish.) Taking over the family ranch in Pinedale, Wyoming, when his father fell ill in the early ’70s, Barlow would spend a decade and a half on the physical frontier, becoming an ardent conservationist and chair of the Republican party in Sublette County; in these roles, he would build coalitions with a Wyoming politician named Dick Cheney, eventually becoming a campaign coordinator for the young congressman. (Their relationship ends in the late ’80s with a typically delicious anecdote that confirms that at least one person—Barlow—was able to compare the then-secretary of defense to Dr. Strangelove to his face.)

  Throughout Mother American Night Barlow’s exquisite understanding of power—and his tendency to channel it in the spirit of a heroic (white, male) frontiersman—shines through. (It’s not mentioned in the book, but Barlow was friends and neighbors with Darrell Winfield, the actual Marlboro Man of the cigarette ad campaign.) Just as it takes a certain kind of personality (and often privilege) to enter politics, Barlow was predisposed towards big gestures. Naming and co-founding the Electronic Frontier Foundation with Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet developer Mitch Kapor in 1990, the EFF simultaneously became the ACLU for the digital world and gave the pre-web internet one of its more pliant analogies (and certainly more romantic than Al Gore’s “Information Superhighway”).

  But in the same way that western settlers came to the real American frontier seeing an empty landscape, Barlow’s metaphor making was presumptuous. If the internet was the “new Home of Mind” (as his “Declaration” would have it) the internet was already the old Home of Military Research, a fact he would realize soon enough. (Its early days were famously funded by Darpa.) Even so, perhaps through sheer force of will, Barlow could more clearly see what the internet would become. He grasped the disruptive nature of bits more than most, a metaphoric nano-technology that would turn the already-humming information age inside out and transform daily life on nearly every continent. He could see the shifts happening, upending bases of economic and political power.

  The word “libertarian” never appears in Mother American Night, but, to varying degrees, that’s what Barlow was, and the ideas orbiting that term would shape the EFF’s broader mission. “I found it most effective to be inside the Republican Party acting as a libertarian,” he once said. Calling out the government’s digital surveillance before there was even a World Wide Web, Barlow was just responsible-enough sounding to scan as an adult, but told enough acid stories to read as a rebel. (In his WIRED obituary, Steven Levy suggested that Barlow “wielded [his rock-and-roll bonafides] like an all-access laminate to the concert hall of life.”)

  His ideas about political economy could sometimes be conventionally free market, but they were almost always rendered with a Barlowian verve. “Nature is a free market system,” Barlow wrote in 1998. “A rain forest is an unplanned economy, as is a coral reef. The difference between an economy that sorts the information and energy in photons and one that sorts the information and energy in dollars is a slight one in my mind. Economy is ecology.” Perhaps so, but it’s also hard to deny that the Great Barrier Reef might have been better off with some New Deal-style aquatic intervention.

  In the end, Barlow’s instincts swayed toward social responsibility too much to be a true libertarian. He was his own brand of hippie crossed with heroic frontiersman. When figures like Edward Snowden began to emerge in the 21st century, Barlow was a natural ally, establishing the Freedom of the Press Foundation with Snowden, journalists Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras, actor John Cusack, and others.

  But Barlow’s vision was “incomplete,” one-time EFF organizer and WIRED alum April Glaser wrote persuasively in February. His “distaste for regulation ... likely helped lay the groundwork for the unhinged growth of the corporate walled gardens we have today,” she argued. If Barlow was willing to stand up to the NSA, his stance on Facebook’s surveillance might be blurrier. In a follow-up story, Glaser called out the present-day EFF (as well as other groups like the Center for Democracy and Technology and the Open Technology Institute) for their lack of campaigns against corporate privacy violations.

  THOUGH BARLOW ENGAGES in plenty of late-life self-reflection in Mother American Night, it is generally of a personal nature, affirming his political thought rather than reassessing it. Perhaps owing to its as-told-to nature, the book often feels like a shorthand for a life as expansive as Barlow’s. The book could easily have been twice the length of its 288 pages, given Barlow’s CV—and it’s a shame it isn’t. (Given his ill health in the last half decade of his life, and Barlow’s checkered record with publishing contracts, it’s a remarkable achievement as is.)

  Where Mother American Night excels is channeling Barlow’s restless, celebratory spirit, pulsing with a sense of constant movement. “I’m still walking, so I’m sure that I can dance,” he wrote on the Grateful Dead’s “Saint of Circumstance,” released on 1980’s Go to Heaven. And while Barlow often invoked Rob Brezsny’s concept of “pronoia,” the feeling that the universe is conspiring in one’s favor, Barlow’s lyrics for the Dead could also be caustic. “There may come a day when I dance on your grave,” he wrote on “Hell In A Bucket,” “and if unable to dance, I will crawl across it.”

  Spotted boogieing at Dead shows (and later, Burning Man), Barlow became an unofficial ambassador between the band and the sprawling world of Deadheads. It was this relationship that, in fact, helped lead Barlow online in the first place, to the burgeoning (and still active) Bay Area online community the WELL—the Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link—spawned by Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth Review. It is Barlow’s relationship with Deadheads, in fact, that may mark one of his most positive impacts.

  Unsure what to do about the increasing hoard of fans showing at Dead shows with microphones to record the band’s jams, Barlow became a voice encouraging the group to embrace the free, noncommercial exchange of live recordings by Deadheads. In doing so, an alternative music distribution system was born, a living example of the open internet before it really even existed—a decentralized and still-vital fan-driven alternative to Spotify, and part of the Dead (and Deadheads) own long history as early adopters of technology. As a friend of the Dead’s housemate Neal Cassady, the hero of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, Barlow bridged the Beat counterculture and the digital now, connecting the freedom-seeking impulses of the psychedelic era with the surreal possibilities (and potential bad trips) of the internet.

  In many ways, Mother American Night is very much of the memoir implied by its subtitle—My Life in Crazy Times—filled with reckless behavior, high times, and rehab. For all his digital tendencies, Barlow’s sexing, drugging, and rock-and-rolling threaten to reduce him to a stereotype—Just Another Baby Boomer Who Changed the World—that hasn’t been receiving the highest ratings of late.

  But what redeems Barlow and Mother American Night is the pervading sense of Barlow as a soulful and self-aware human. Libertarian or Republican or acidhead or whatever else he may have been, Barlow had an equally long record of being a sympathetic person capable of defying labels and even bucking the past. He was, as he liked to remind people, “the first historically recorded male from either side of [the] family not to pass his whole career in agriculture.”

  Barlow grew up in rural Wyoming and on the rural internet. Unlike Wyoming, though, the internet still seems capable of blasting open new and dangerous frontiers, from botnet swarms to deep state hacks. Though prophetic in many ways, Barlow’s dreams of a borderless free and equal internet seem more impossible with each passing year. Lately, the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation has wreaked havoc on the flow of information, suddenly blocking European access to some American publications, and somehow reintroducing a sense of once-conquered distance. As a thinker and writer, if Barlow’s work remains vital, it will be less because his ideas were accurate but because the mind behind them shows up so vividly and warmly when his words are re-read.

  Perhaps the book’s most telling incident occurs fairly early on, while Barlow is the student body president at Wesleyan. Ever the mover and shaker, Barlow’s extracurricular activities as an undergrad included spending time taking LSD with Leary at the Millbrook estate (and Mother American Night features some powerful descriptions of Barlow’s early trips), as well as spending the 1967 Summer of Love hanging out at the Grateful Dead’s pad in Haight-Ashbury.

  But, “by the time I got back to Wesleyan in the fall, I was pretty crazy,” Barlow writes. “I didn’t chill out in San Francisco or get some vision of peace, love, and flowers. Instead I decided to become a suicide bomber.” The college student concluded that “if I did something really outrageous and horrible… it would cause everybody to take a hard look at where we were headed in terms of consciousness.”

  And so it was that the future Dead lyricist decided to follow the Summer of Love with the Autumn of death, synthesizing high-yield DIY explosives, and driving himself from Wesleyan to the far more high-profile Harvard Yard. It would be the kind of “heroic” act that only a twisted turn of logic could conceive, but also the product of the same mind that would unfurl both the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the lyrics to the Grateful Dead’s “Cassidy.” Thankfully, he is tracked to Cambridge by school administrators and talked down.

  Reading Mother American Night, you’ll learn plenty about John Perry Barlow, but still be unable to predict how he might react to any given piece of information. There are just too many complex filters in his brain. Any visions of, say, feeding this book and Barlow’s many megabytes of text, abandoned manuscripts, and unmade screenplays into a neural net and generating a Barlow AI to reoccupy @jpbarlow are dashed by stories like these. John Perry Barlow was—and is—too real and too unpredictable to be reanimated by algorithm, a spirit in the system too lifelike to be a ghost in the machine.

  The self-righteousness would remain intact in Barlow through the decades, a quality that manifests itself throughout Mother American Night with varying degrees of charm. If not quite a total human (as he would’ve been first to admit), Barlow’s “hanging out with intent” worked out; in the end, less a networker than a network unto himself.

  Jesse Jarnow (@bourgwick) is the author of Heads: A Biography of Psychedelic America.

• Publishers Weekly
  https://www.publishersweekly.com/978-1-5247-6018-2
  Word count: 240

  Mother American Night
  John Perry Barlow, with Robert Greenfield. Crown Archetype, $27 (288p) ISBN 978-1-5247-6018-2

  In his entertainingly unruly memoir, the late Barlow (1947–2018) takes stock of his maverick life as a cattle rancher, counterculture spokesman, and songwriter for the Grateful Dead. Scion of a prominent Wyoming ranching family, Barlow had an independent streak that served him well in the tumult of the 1960s counterculture. Encounters with Timothy Leary and psychedelics diverted him to India, the Summer of Love in San Francisco, and a musical partnership with fellow prep school misfit Bob Weir. In 1978, he got involved in local politics after moving back to the family ranch, and eventually became the campaign coordinator for Dick Cheney’s successful 1978 run for Congress. Self-aware and self-aggrandizing, dynamic and indolent, Barlow embodies the triumphs and failures of his baby boomer cohort. Shrewd insights into Leary and Jerry Garcia (whom he almost persuaded to do a photo shoot with President George H.W. Bush) mingle indiscriminately with observations of JFK Jr., Daryl Hannah, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, and other celebrities. Barlow, however, barely touches on his family life: his wife and three daughters rate no more ink than his insistence that the administration and the radicals at Wesleyan thought he was cool. Barlow’s blend of charisma, ability, and dissipation makes for a great narrative from a complex public figure. (May)
  DETAILS
  Reviewed on: 06/04/2018
  Release date: 06/05/2018

• Electronic Frontier Foundation
  https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/06/book-review-john-perry-barlows-mother-american-night
  Word count: 575

  Book Review: John Perry Barlow’s Mother American Night
  BY JASON KELLEYJUNE 6, 2018

  For many, John Perry Barlow’s name might be inseparable from the digital advocacy work he did in the early days of the Internet. But the EFF co-founder’s impact—and adventures—spanned areas as diverse as Hollywood, politics, popular music, and environmental policy. His newly-released memoir, Mother American Night: My Life in Crazy Times, follows Barlow, who passed away earlier this year, from his upbringing in Wyoming as “ranching royalty,” through to the experience of writing his first song for the Grateful Dead (“Mexicali Blues”), up to the phone calls with hackers in the Legion of Doom that led him to work with Mitch Kapor in creating the Electronic Frontier Foundation—and beyond.

  Barlow’s “crazy times” extend beyond his more well-known interactions with the Dead during the Summer of Love and his conversations on the “Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link” (AKA the WELL, an early virtual community) during the first years of the Internet. Barlow writes of the time he spent at Andy Warhol’s famous Factory; of traveling on a pilgrimage through India after selling the rights to a novel straight out of college; and of his relationships with people with backgrounds as diverse as Steve Jobs, Timothy Leary, and John F. Kennedy, Jr. He was, it seems, good at being in the right places at the right times with the right people, while doing what he calls, in a typical Barlow-ism, “hanging out with intent.”

  As a result, Mother American Night reads like a history of the culture clashes of the last fifty years: offline versus online, rural versus urban, government versus private life. As a rancher who ended up co-founding EFF and the Freedom of the Press Foundation as well as working as Dick Cheney’s campaign coordinator, one of Barlow’s most impressive qualities was straddling, and bringing together, these sometimes opposing cultures.

  For those interested in the early days of digital rights and online culture, and how John Perry Barlow ended up more or less at the center of that scene (as well as a dozen others), Mother American Night should be satisfying—and humbling. Just a few years before writing now-famous essays like “Crime and Puzzlement” and “Selling Wine Without Bottles,” even this giant of the Internet didn’t understand cyberspace when it was first explained to him in what he says was, “a quantity of time and language that embarrasses me to contemplate today.”

  It wasn’t just Barlow that didn’t have a handle on the Internet at first. After he came to understand it, and began promoting digital rights, he says that he “had a constituency that was not yet defined by previously formed political views,” and writing in cyberspace made him feel “unbounded.” While we may not feel as unbounded when we post online these days, this was just thirty years ago—and we should remember that we are each members of that online constituency, and we continue to define, and redefine, the space for ourselves, politically and otherwise. For everyone working to protect rights online, Mother American Night is a helpful reminder of just how quickly the online spaces that Barlow helped define thirty years ago have shifted, and can shift again—for the better, if we work for it—wherever we come from, and whatever our background.

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