Internet and communities

John Perry Barlow has done a lot of diverse things in his life. In the free-software world, he is probably best known for co-founding the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), but others will know him best as a lyricist for the Grateful Dead. Along the way, he was a cattle rancher in Wyoming for twenty years. All of those experiences shaped him, clearly; he came to PyCon 2014 in Montréal, Canada to impart some of what he has learned over the years in a somewhat rambling, but amusing—and ultimately fascinating—keynote.

Internet uncle

He confessed at the outset that he is now an "elder of the internet"; an "internet uncle". That is strange to him, since he spent most of his life trying to continue to be an adolescent; "being an elder is something of a drag". But there are advantages to being an elder and an adolescent, he said, "you still have the desire to do crazy shit, but you know what crazy shit is likely to fail badly".

He popularized the term "cyberspace"—coined by William Gibson—to refer to the internet. When he found cyberspace in 1985, there was already a recognizable culture there that a had a certain flavor. He immediately thought it might be a new substrate for communities to form in. It reminded him, in some ways, of the small town in Wyoming where he grew up. There was a sense of shared adversity and a "real density" to the relationships shared that was similar in the town and in cyberspace.

Much of that small-town culture was being supplanted by "television-land and suburbia". There was a rise of corporate working environments where there was a great deal of pressure for individuals to pretend to be like all of the other employees so that the company could treat them as individual cogs in the machine. The impetus for privacy was so that the company couldn't figure out that, like everyone else, you were "weird as hell".

Everybody is weird, he said. If you examine them on the inside, everyone is unusual. He is the one who talks to you throughout an airplane flight, he said, which "some of you hate". But he does it to prove to people that they are more interesting than they think they are, he said with a laugh.

Spreading the internet

He became convinced that the right way to fight this attack on small-town (and other) cultures was to spread the internet everywhere, so that everyone had access to it. Now we see that it is not just everyone, but everything that will have access to the internet. He thought that outcome would be a "slam dunk", but, then, he also believed that the "Age of Aquarius" was a slam dunk too. "So I was already prepared for disappointment", he said, with another of the laughs that permeated the keynote.

The internet was about "connection, not separation", it was about conversation, rather than the channel, which stands in stark contrast to broadcast media. The media companies are about "content", which is a "code word" used by those companies to claim ownership of all human expression. The internet has the potential to give a voice to everyone, which in many cases "will be a terrible idea". Just because everyone has a voice, does not mean that everyone else has to listen to it.

He thought that the internet and its culture would just "kind of slide in, invisibly" into the void left once the nation-states realized they had nothing left to do after the cold war was over. "I underestimated them". He also underestimated the three monotheistic world religions which were threatened by the internet. When the "word" does not need to be filtered through a book or document that is "absolutely, positively right", it "plays hell" with church authority.

He knew that the record business was one of the ugliest industries out there, but he was still surprised that it would rather kill itself and everybody in it, rather "than do something that was wise and decent". He has spent many years trying to explain to that industry that it is not in its interest to "make expression scarce". There is a huge difference between an information economy and one of hard goods.

Adam Smith was right about scarcity and goods, but it is completely different with expression and information, he said. In the latter case, familiarity is important, while scarcity really is not. If he has the largest diamond in the world in his pocket, it is still valuable even though no one knows it is there. But he can have the best song ever in his head, and it has no value unless it is shared with others. It then gathers value slowly, dependent on how many people can sing along.

Lessons from the Grateful Dead

The band that he wrote for discovered this value proposition accidentally. It invented viral marketing without really meaning to. It was a very improvisational organization, "LSD will do that", he said with a grin, "it doesn't give you a lot of choice". The band noticed that people were taping their concerts, and the record company said they needed to stop that because the fans were "stealing something from them". But the band had a hard time understanding what was being stolen—it had no intention of ever playing the same show twice. It didn't seem likely that people would not buy the records because there were these tapes of the show. It also didn't seem right to be mean to Deadheads, who are, he said, "a hapless bunch".

So the band allowed people to tape their concerts. Those tapes became an "unbelievably effective" way to spread the word about the band's music. By the time the band died, though maybe it hasn't yet as it still "clings to weird life", it could fill any stadium in the US (and perhaps the world) without ever having a hit record, based on the fact that all of their tapes had been big hits. "And the fact that we could haul our audience around with us", Barlow said.

The community of Deadheads and the aspect of sharing within that community reminds him, in some ways, of the Pythonista community. There have been cultures associated with languages before ("French is a good example", he said to audience laughter), but there is always the question of who has the authority role. At one point he mentioned to EFF co-founder Mitch Kapor that the internet was finally an example of a "working anarchy". Kapor, though, noted that underneath any working anarchy is an "old boy network". That is probably true with the Python community too, though he hopes and believes that we are starting to see the emergence of a "young girl network" instead. Kapor also said that there is often a "benevolent dictator" role in a working anarchy as well, and Python certainly has that.

In the early days of the internet, there were sometimes cultures associated with programming languages, but they were typically small and "often cult-like". TeX and Lisp were two that he mentioned (the Lisp people would sometimes "go a little nuts on you"). There was also the Unix/C culture, where everyone "looked like Dennis Ritchie". Python is different; it is "young and stylish", more engaged with the world as whole than "the Unix weenies ever dreamed of being". Barlow has attended Unix gatherings, where attendees thought they were being social if "they were looking at your shoes" instead of their own, he said with a chuckle. PyCon has a "completely different flavor".

Governments and rights

He was wrong about what the industrialized nations' governments would do after the cold war. Instead of folding up their tents, those governments are imposing all of the surveillance and control mechanisms that didn't work in the physical world onto cyberspace. He takes some solace in the fact that those governments evidently can't stop his almost daily talks with Edward Snowden. Or maybe they just want to listen in because it is more amusing than what they are thinking about.

As the infrastructure gets taken over by companies like Comcast, which has no "Bill of Rights", or meta-organizations and forums like the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) (though Barlow mistakenly called it "ITT"—he also called it "a dreadful artifact of horror"), there is no redress of grievances available through the courts, there is only "cultural redress" available to combat abuses. That is done by spreading the culture of openness, sharing, curiosity, and human service into the foundations of what will become the next generation of cyberspace.

Barlow said that he dreams of a day ("it's not a crazy dream") when anyone on the planet can find out everything we know about a certain subject, regardless of where they live. It is a dream of a "right to know" that is (or should be) a natural human right, and should extend to every being on the planet. There is a right to know what governments are doing, as well as how and why they are doing it. For that to come true, it relies "on people like you" who are building the plumbing, he said.

Around the time of the founding of EFF, he was expressing dismay that the US Bill of Rights is really a set of local ordinances. They can only be enforced in a place where the enforcer also has the ability to take them away. Rights are not something that you can depend on any government to extend to its subjects, those rights have to be embodied in the technical architecture of the internet. Those attending PyCon and "people like you" are the ones who can define that technical architecture to make sure that his dream comes true. That way, we "will end up being extremely good ancestors after all".

Q&A

That ended the keynote, but Barlow then took questions from the audience. They ranged widely, and he often answered at length. Some of the more interesting exchanges covered things like privacy as well as his suggestions for what Pythonistas and the wider community can do in the coming years.

Barlow grew up in a small town where no one had any privacy. There was a "mutually assured destructive capacity", though, because everyone knew where the bodies were buried, so it was "best to not start digging". Our reasons for wanting privacy are bad, he said. We fear the judgment of agencies who should not be making judgments over our personal lives.

On the other side of the coin, the secret services want secrecy partly to disguise their "complete incompetence". It is important to let the light shine in on their activities. He helped found an organization (the Freedom of the Press Foundation) that is working to protect people who find themselves in the same position as Snowden. That organization will try to make sure that what whistleblowers have to say can get said, and to protect the people that say them. It is also working on easy-to-use crypto tools for journalists.

Currently, the work on open-source tools for helping journalists resides "in the vicinity of Tor and its many manifestations". There are already lots of Tor packets on the internet, he said, which routinely make some traffic less visible. The EFF's HTTPS Everywhere initiative also helps keep traffic encrypted, or "did until recently", he said referring to the Heartbleed vulnerability.

For the Python community, Barlow suggested that it keep "doing what you appear to be doing". He suggested that it "resist ideology", but "encourage belief". There is a fine line between the two, but ideology is in the head and belief is in the heart. Try not to impose opinions on people, and try to get consensus to work for most decisions. There will be politics, of course; that's "life among the humans", but from what he has seen, the Python community is "not political by the standards I have become accustomed to".

Barlow was asked how he reconciled the idea of the "right to know" with the collection of enormous amounts of surveillance data by governments; does it just come down to a "good vs. evil" question? He said that he has consulted with the NSA and CIA for more than twenty years. There are constituencies within those organizations that want to figure out what the "truth" is so that the decision-makers have the right information to base their decisions upon. He said that he would really like to put Mike Hayden (former Director of both the NSA and CIA) together with Snowden. He likes them both and thinks that he might be able broker a truce (or at least a conversation) between them, he said with a laugh.

In the end, the more data that "evil" has, the better off we are. It is looking for needles in haystacks, and when you do that, you don't want to increase the size of the haystack exponentially. Instead, you want a better magnet. The security agencies don't know the difference between data and information, which means we are "spared their despotism by their incompetence", he said.

While he is not a fan of government, in general, he is in favor of "some government". He would like to see a government that ensures kids don't starve at school and one where people don't have to produce some kind of medical card before they can get care. He is for localizing government to the extent possible, perhaps to the level of the city-state. That is the level of government that "seems to work", and the one that works well with cyberspace, he said. It would be great to see a renaissance of the city-state, the likes of which we haven't seen since the Renaissance.

A video of the keynote is available at pyvideo.org. Videos of many of the other PyCon sessions, perhaps all of them, are at the site as well.