EFF Founder John Perry Barlow Has Died At Age 70 (eff.org)

The Electronic Frontier Foundation reports that its founder, John Perry Barlow, has passed away quietly in his sleep this morning. He was 70 years old. From the report: It is no exaggeration to say that major parts of the Internet we all know and love today exist and thrive because of Barlow's vision and leadership. He always saw the Internet as a fundamental place of freedom, where voices long silenced can find an audience and people can connect with others regardless of physical distance. Barlow was sometimes held up as a straw man for a kind of naive techno-utopianism that believed that the Internet could solve all of humanity's problems without causing any more. As someone who spent the past 27 years working with him at EFF, I can say that nothing could be further from the truth.

Barlow knew that new technology could create and empower evil as much as it could create and empower good. He made a conscious decision to focus on the latter: "I knew it's also true that a good way to invent the future is to predict it. So I predicted Utopia, hoping to give Liberty a running start before the laws of Moore and Metcalfe delivered up what Ed Snowden now correctly calls 'turn-key totalitarianism.'" Barlow's lasting legacy is that he devoted his life to making the Internet into "a world that all may enter without privilege or prejudice accorded by race, economic power, military force, or station of birth... a world where anyone, anywhere may express his or her beliefs, no matter how singular, without fear of being coerced into silence or conformity."

Comments

Re:EFF is okay: Mozilla is Sorosized

[Betty Crocker]

What REALLY bothered me was that they have been so anti-Trump. They were Obama-leaning in the last cycle. What gives? We went from fascist dictator Bush to ultraliberal dictator Obama, and now we have by most measures a moderate who is keeping his campaign promises and seemingly is trying to help the country even if he doesn't know the best way to do it. He's not a Republican. He's not a Democrat. The guy's got a taste of what it is like to be on the receiving end of the Deep State. It takes an unprecedented level of ego, arrogance, social skill, and intelligence to be able to go up against the Deep State.

You know, the kind of Deep State where dissidents will be convicted of "tax evasion" in a Soviet manner.

The kind of Deep State where The Party picks the candidates.
The kind of Deep State where the president spies on any possible dissident candidate because he might be an "unknown quantity."
The kind of Deep State where the hand-picked next president pays for a fake dossier to shut down the guy who threw a wrench in the works.
The kind of Deep State where a phony investigation goes on over a phony dossier off and on in various forms for two years and yields NOTHING.
The kind of Deep State where evidence can be destroyed with bleachbit and hammers, where justice is obviously obstructed, and nothing comes of it.
The kind of Deep State that is the mainstream media with the exception of Faux News that is just as phony but not completely under its purview.
The kind of Deep State that uses foreign interests such as the Arab-owned/operated Bizx, LLC. to purchase sites such as Slashdot and run them into the ground with illiterate third worlders and uneducated high schoolers better off running the school paper.

Shall I continue? How about Rear Admiral Rogers going to warn Trump to get out of Trump Tower because he was in such danger after the election and before the inauguration, a warning so grave that he had moved his operations to Florida the very next day?