Cyberspace: The Community Frontier

As technological advances are literally reinventing their profession, librarians can take a cue from John Perry Barlow. The son of a Wyoming State Senator and a 1969 graduate of Wesleyan University, CT, Barlow has gone through quite a reinvention himself. As late as 1988 Barlow was punching cattle at the Bar Cross Land and Livestock Company in Cora, WY. Just a few short years later, in 1992, he published the landmark article "The Economy of Ideas" for Wired magazine, one of the most influential pieces ever written on the nature of information in the age of technology.

Today, Barlow, previously famed for his work as a lyricist for the legendary rock band the Grateful Dead, is widely regarded as one of the world's greatest thinkers on technology and culture. He regularly writes for a variety of publications, and his name still appears on Wired's masthead. He has cofounded and works with the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), the influential organization representing the public's interests in the digital world. He also is a fellow at Harvard University's Berkman Center for Internet and Society. Even if you've never read anything of Barlow's, never heard him speak, never heard any of his songs, chances are there's at least one invention of Barlow's you'll recognize. In 1990, he carved a permanent niche in the world's emerging technological vernacular when he took a term from the works of sf hero William Gibson and applied it to an emerging technology known as the World Wide Web—cyberspace.

In and of itself, Barlow's transformation is an amazing story. In chatting with him, however, his transformation seems far less unlikely. In fact, it seems altogether reasonable—the perfect embodiment of the promise of technology and how it can enable our lives. For all their newness, the terms and subjects Barlow now farms—"information economics," "digitized intellectual goods," and "cyberliberties"—are born from a simple notion every librarian, even those still catching up with the latest technology, is equally familiar with: community. LJ caught up with a busy Barlow and talked with him about this "place" called cyberspace.

LJ: You're a tough man to pin down and your time is always in demand, so I thank you for taking the time to sit and talk with me today…

JB: Of course. I guess that's one problem with being an Internet guru, as they called it during the 1990s. The Internet has seemed to attach itself to every single aspect of human endeavor, so I find myself having to be sort of an expert and talk on a lot of different topics.

LJ: The Internet has certainly attached itself to libraries—and so, not surprisingly, your work is popular with librarians…

JB: Well, then it's a mutual admiration society. Libraries are one of my most favorite things.

LJ: With the Internet, there has been a lot of talk about librarians "remaking" their profession—something you're clearly familiar with. How did you go from cattle rancher to Internet guru?

JB: Essentially it was a result of an interest in the future of community. I think community is an essential spiritual nutrient for human beings. I come from a small town in Wyoming and a life that I could see was a doomed proposition, as it is in so many other small agricultural towns today. So I was trying to think about how new communities would form after agriculture had become so efficient that it took less than one percent of the population to feed everybody. One of the areas in which I thought I might be seeing some hopeful signs was in the Deadheads [fans of the Grateful Dead].

LJ: How did the Deadheads inspire the world's first Internet guru?

JB: Well, Deadheads had a lot of characteristics of, say, a medium-size town. They were a tight community. But what I couldn't understand was how they had achieved that aspect of random interaction that is so essential to community. You know, meeting at the public library or the village square. Until someone suggested to me that the continuous space Deadheads inhabited was called the ARPAnet (Advanced Research Projects Agency Network), the forerunner of the Internet. The ARPAnet was a government network mostly for defense contractors. It just so happened there were a lot of Deadheads among defense contractors, and they had set up newsgroups on the ARPAnet. A lot of the random interaction in that community was taking place there. When I first got on the ARPAnet and a community bulletin board called the Well, I immediately felt like I was dealing in a social space.

LJ: What do you mean when you say it felt like a social space?

JB: It didn't feel like any kind of communication medium that I had ever encountered. It felt like an environment—a place where people had invisibly gathered. I thought it was fascinating for people to come together in a space where they couldn't bring their bodies. That was 1985, which is pretty early. And there really wasn't anyone else writing about this—the "sociology" of cyberspace. No one seemed to view cyberspace as I did—as a place. And no one then had the vision I did that sooner or later everyone in the human race would be a part of it. It wasn't too long before I decided that being a cattle rancher was essentially hopeless and what interested me more than anything else was what was going to happen to this Internet thing.

LJ: So, in your estimation, from your start in 1985 to now, what has happened to this Internet thing?

JB: Well, it's gone from involving probably 100,000 people to more than a billion people, which is a pretty incredible growth rate. But at the same time it had to suffer the dot-com boom, which, I suppose, was inevitable. If you look at the history of, say, transportation or communications, every time there is a great leap forward—the railroad, the telegraph—there is an enormous amount of opportunism and hype. People get excited. It attracts both visionaries and hucksters. In this case, the Internet, it was pretty hard to tell them apart. Yet despite the economic collapse, the whole world is getting online.

LJ: You've been very involved in helping the world to get online, especially in developing countries. How is that progressing?

JB: I was in Africa this year. I went into a cybercenter, and there were probably 500 people in there 24 hours a day. Every single terminal was constantly occupied. That's significant. I was also in Cambodia, and every place I went to there I could get e-mail. This is going on everywhere. Now this may not have a lot to do with the dot-com economy, but it has a great deal to do with the stuff librarians are interested in, which is access to human knowledge and the capacity to spread it. Because it really is conceivable that in ten years, if we can somehow deal with the national lines on copyright protectionism, every child on this planet will have access to every book on this planet. Think about what kind of a society that would create.

LJ: As cyberspace develops, do you think libraries will maintain a physical role in their communities?

JB: Oh, absolutely. In fact, I think physical libraries will be even more important in the future. Communities need that physical element. But libraries will have to be places where people do more than go to get books, because a lot of what people want they will be able get online. Libraries will be places where people will go to exchange ideas, and librarians will be even more essential than they are now, guiding people to information, knowing where to find it. I look at the potential for librarians and for libraries as being venues for all manner of salons, where the objective is not silence but conversation.

LJ: Let's talk about print. We're beginning to hear a lot of talk about the "paperless library," but can things exist just in the ether?

JB: Oh, I don't think so. I think the book has a promising future. Everybody thought the computer would create the paperless office, but precisely the opposite has happened. People are printing more than ever. People also thought the Internet was going to hurt the sale of books. But now there are more books for sale than there have ever been, and the number of books published in this country has skyrocketed. I think books will be with us for a long time.

LJ: Your 1992 article The Economy of Ideas in Wired still resonates today...

JB: Yeah, I was really hitting a lick that day! (laughs).

LJ: One line you wrote that has always stuck with me is, "information is experienced not possessed." What is the Internet teaching us about the nature of information?

JB: I think cyberspace is gradually teaching us that information is a verb, not a noun. This is a very important thing. Information is a relationship. It is something that exists in the space between two minds or many minds. It is not something that is merely encapsulated and collected into some physical object. But we have a lot of habits that were developed out of an industrial economy that make it very difficult for us to imagine things any other way.

LJ: So what does the idea of viewing information as a verb mean for libraries?

JB: Even with their physical books in their traditional libraries, librarians have always had a holy mission to see that information was available. Now they have the opportunity to see that information is everywhere. That is enormously exciting. The problem is, for some, especially administrators, that they have to think a lot about legal issues—which is their job, in fairness. They have to be concerned about copyright violations, keeping pornography from minors, and all the other kinds of proscribed materials that are, as many librarians would argue, still part of the overall ecology of ideas. So, unfortunately, right now there is also a great deal of tension.

LJ: Speaking of that tension, what are your thoughts on peer-to-peer technology and file sharing? Will this technology ever be allowed to reach its potential?

JB: The current efforts on the part of the entertainment industry that would enable them to shut down the parts of the Internet engaged in peer-to-peer trading is adverse in so many ways, I barely know where to start. Aside from impoverishing the advancement of human thought, it could really cripple the future of the Internet in a profound way. It also promulgates this dangerous idea that if you are sharing information you are engaging in theft. When I first realized what the architecture of Napster was my first thought was not, "What a great way to spread music," it was, "This at last is the Internet!" This is how the neurology of the great mind will develop. This is the real thing, where every neuron can speak to every neuron and not be dependent on the ganglia, or, in other words, the servers.

LJ: Does copyright have a place in cyberspace? Can intellectual property be respected in cyberspace without implementing barriers, like encryption?

JB: I personally think the very term intellectual property is an oxymoron. I believe that something is property if you can take it away from me and I won't have it any more. This is not true for expression or thought. I wouldn't recommend throwing copyright out as it regards physical copies. Copyright still makes a lot of sense for books and CDs and tangible manifestations of intellectual goods. But what the content industry is trying to do in cyberspace is have not only the same protections we had for physical goods but increased protections—protections that would eliminate fair use so you can't have access to any intellectual material without paying the so-called publisher. This could not be more opposed to what cyberspace is about. Cyberspace is the ultimate great jungle of human thought. For us to fence it off would be a repudiation of everything and everyone who built it to this point.

LJ: You cofounded the EFF, which has fought on the front lines in a number of battles important to the library community. What's your message to librarians on behalf of the EFF?

JB: I hope more librarians will join us. Librarians' entire raison d'être is up for grabs. The American Library Association has been extremely helpful, especially with the [Child Online Protection Act] case and other legislative issues. But librarians still have a culture that is kind of polite, circumspect, maybe a little reticent. If librarians really care about what they do, they need to become more politically involved. These issues in cyberspace are not going to go away, and they could turn out very badly. I would love to see more librarians ready to charge the battlements, because you can't be confident that this is all going to work out and virtue will prevail. Not now.