Thursday 8 February 2018

RIP John Perry Barlow, 1947-2018 / Boing Boing

RIP John Perry Barlow, 1947-2018 / Boing Boing: "As EFF's Cindy Cohn -- who introduced me to Barlow -- writes, Barlow has been recently vilified as a naif who failed to foresee the power of the internet to control and censor, to troll and dox, but nothing could be farther from the truth.

Barlow wrote the Declaration and co-founded the Electronic Frontier Foundation precisely because he foresaw those possibilities: he saw that the world would be remade by general-purpose networks tied to general-purpose computers, and that unless we committed ourselves to making that network free, and fair, and open, that it would give the powerful and wicked the power to exert unprecedented, near-total control over our lives.

 Today, Barlow is dead, and his vision is vindicated: the risks Barlow foresaw (along with other EFF founders like John Gilmore and Mitch Kapor) are more imminent than ever" 'via Blog this'

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