Background and career
John Perry Barlow (October 3, 1947 – February 7, 2018) was an American poet, essayist, cattle rancher, and cyberlibertarian political activist. He was also a lyricist for the Grateful Dead, a founding member of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Freedom of the Press Foundation, and an early fellow at Harvard University's Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society.
Barlow was born in Sublette County, Wyoming near the town of Cora, the only child of Norman Walker Barlow, a Republican state legislator, and his wife, Miriam Adeline Barlow (née Jenkins, later Bailey), who married in 1929. Barlow's paternal ancestors were Mormon pioneers. He grew up on Bar Cross Ranch in Cora, Wyoming, a 22,000-acre (8,900 ha) property his great-uncle founded in 1907, and attended elementary school in a one-room schoolhouse. He was raised as a devout member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and prohibited from watching television until the sixth grade, when his parents allowed him to "absorb televangelists". Although Barlow's academic record was erratic throughout his secondary education, he "had his pick of top eastern universities... simply because he was from Wyoming, where few applications originated". In 1969, he graduated from Wesleyan University's College of Letters, where he joined the Alpha Delta Phi fraternity. He served as Wesleyan's student body president until the administration "tossed him into a sanitarium" following a drug-induced attempted suicide attack in Boston, Massachusetts. After two weeks of rehabilitation, he returned to his studies. In his senior year, he became a part-time resident of New York City's East Village and immersed himself in Andy Warhol's Factory, cultivating a friendship with Rene Ricard and developing a brief addiction to heroin. As he neared graduation, Barlow was admitted to Harvard Law School. He was also contracted to write a novel by Farrar, Straus and Giroux at novelist and historian Paul Horgan's behest. Initially supported by an advance of either $5,000 or $1,000, he decided instead to spend two years traveling the world, including nine months in India, a winter stay on Long Island Sound in Connecticut, and a screenwriting foray in Los Angeles. Barlow eventually finished the novel, but it was rejected by several publishers (including Farrar, Straus and Giroux) and remains unpublished. During this period, he also "lived beside Needle Park on New York's Upper West Side and dealt cocaine in Spanish Harlem".
At age 15, Barlow became a student at the Fountain Valley School in Colorado Springs, Colorado. There he met Bob Weir, who later co-founded the Grateful Dead. Weir and Barlow maintained a close friendship through the years. As a frequent visitor during college to Timothy Leary's facility in Millbrook, New York, Barlow was introduced to LSD; he later claimed to have consumed the substance over 1,000 times. These transformative experiences led him to distance himself from Mormonism. He went on to facilitate the first meeting between the Grateful Dead and the Leary organization (who recognized each other as kindred souls in spite of their differing philosophical approaches) in June 1967. While on his way to California to reunite with the Grateful Dead in 1971, Barlow stopped at his family's ranch, not intending to stay. His father had suffered a debilitating stroke in 1966 before dying in 1972, resulting in a $700,000 business debt. Dismayed by the situation, Barlow changed his plans and began practicing animal husbandry under the auspices of the Bar Cross Land and Livestock Company in Cora, Wyoming, for almost two decades. To support the ranch, he continued to write and sell spec scripts. In the meantime, Barlow was still able to play an active role in the Grateful Dead while recruiting many unconventional part-time ranch hands from the mainstream as well as the counterculture. Prior to his death in 2018, John Byrne Cooke intended to produce a documentary film (provisionally titled The Bar Cross Ranch) that documented this era.
Barlow became interested in collaborating with Weir at a Grateful Dead show at the Capitol Theatre in Port Chester, New York, in February 1971. Until then, Weir had mostly worked with resident Dead lyricist Robert Hunter. Hunter preferred that those who sang his songs stick to his "canonical" lyrics rather than improvise additions or rearrange words. A feud erupted backstage over a couplet in "Sugar Magnolia" from the band's most recent release (most likely "She can dance a Cajun rhythm/Jump like a Willys in four-wheel drive"), culminating in a disgruntled Hunter summoning Barlow and telling him "take [Weir]—he's yours". In late 1971, with a deal for a solo album in hand and only two songs completed, Weir and Barlow began to write together for the first time. They co-wrote songs such as "Cassidy", "Mexicali Blues" and "Black-Throated Wind", all three of which remained in the repertoires of the Grateful Dead and of Weir's varied solo projects. Barlow subsequently collaborated with Grateful Dead keyboardist Brent Mydland, a partnership that culminated in four songs on 1989's Built to Last. He also wrote one song ("The Devil I Know") with Mydland's successor, Vince Welnick.
In 1986, Barlow joined The WELL, an online community then known for a strong Deadhead presence. He served on the company's board of directors for several years. In 1990, Barlow founded the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) with fellow digital-rights activists John Gilmore and Mitch Kapor. As a founder of EFF, Barlow helped publicize the Secret Service raid on Steve Jackson Games. His involvement is documented in The Hacker Crackdown: Law and Disorder on the Electronic Frontier (1992) by Bruce Sterling. EFF later sponsored the groundbreaking case Steve Jackson Games, Inc. v. United States Secret Service in support of Steve Jackson Games. Steve Jackson Games won the case in 1993. In 1996, Barlow was invited to speak about his work in cyberspace to a middle school classroom at North Shore Country Day School. This event was highly influential upon the life of then-student Aaron Swartz: Swartz's father Robert recalls Aaron coming home that day a changed person. That year, Barlow also wrote "A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace", a widely disseminated creed for the Internet. In 2003, Barlow met the recently appointed Brazilian Minister of Culture Gilberto Gil at the event Tactic Media Brazil to discuss the perspectives of digital inclusion and political participation, which in the following years helped shape Brazilian governmental policy on intellectual property and digital media. In 2004, the two began working together to expand the availability and variety of Brazilian music to remix and share online. At the same time, as one of the "digerati", Barlow was among the first users of the invitation-only social network Orkut at its inception. He decided to send all of his 100 invitations to friends in Brazil; two years later, some 11 million internet users in that country (out of 14 million total) were on the social network.
From 1971 to 1995, Barlow wrote lyrics for the Grateful Dead, mostly through his relationship with Weir. Barlow's songs include "Cassidy" (about Neal Cassady and Cassidy Law), "Estimated Prophet", "Black-Throated Wind", "Hell in a Bucket", "Mexicali Blues", "The Music Never Stopped" and "Throwing Stones".
