John Perry Barlow John Perry BARLOW (1947) is a retired Wyoming cattle rancher, a former lyricist for the Grateful Dead, and co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. In 1990, he and Mitchell Kapor founded the Electronic Frontier Foundation, of which he continues to serve as Vice Chairman. EFF is an organization which promotes freedom of expression in digital media, as well as meditating a variety of social and legal issues arising between the existing governments of the physical world and the emerging governance systems of Cyberspace, the global electronic social space which was not considered to be a "place" until he named it in 1990, originating the contemporary usage of William Gibson's science fiction term. He is a writer, lecturer and consultant on computer security, electronic cash, commerce and community, cryptography, privacy, and digitized intellectual goods. He works as an advisory board member of the Vanguard Group, the Global Business Network, Diamond Technology Partners, and the National Center for Supercomputing Applications. He has been a regular contributor to Wired magazine since its first issue. He is the father of three teenaged daughters for whose descendants he hopes to be a good ancestor by assuring the liberty of Cyberspace. To this end, he wrote the widely distributed "Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace," as well as "The Economy of Ideas," regarded by some to be a seminal work on the future of copyright. As a consequence of these and other essays, he has been occasionally referred to as the "Thomas Jefferson of Cyberspace." He lives and works in Pinedale, Wyoming and in New York City, and can be found most reliably at <barlow@eff.org> Back to "The Moment Before Discovery"