"Information is like a life jerky: dried up and not terribly communicative. Through information you come back to the vast set of phenomena that is creating the data in the first place. Experience and the universe itself are intimately bound up with one another. The purpose of the Internet and all its surrounding phenomena is to create a context where experience is universal, and the informational reduction is no longer necessary."
John Perry Barlow is a former Wyoming rancher and Grateful Dead lyricist. He co-founded and still co-chairs the Electronic Frontier Foundation. He was the first to apply the term Cyberspace to the "place" it presently describes.
He has written for a diversity of publications, including Communications of the ACM, Mondo 2000, the New York Times, and Time. He has been on the masthead of Wired since it was founded. His piece on the future of copyright, "The Economy of Ideas" is taught in many law schools and his "Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace" is posted on thousands of web sites.
In 1997, he was a Fellow at Harvard's Institute of Politics and has been, since 1998, as a Berkman Fellow at the Harvard Law School.
He works actively with several consulting groups, including Diamond Technology Partners, Vanguard, and Global Business Network.
In June 1999, Future Banker magazine named him "One of the 25 Most Influential People in Financial Services."
He writes, speaks, and consults on a broad variety of subjects, particularly digital economy.
He lives in Wyoming, New York, San Francisco, On the Road, and in Cyberspace. He has three teenaged daughters and aspires to be a good ancestor.