John Perry Barlow
[UPDATE] For some strange reason, Dave Winer's blog, Scripting News, has some old posts that are showing up as new. I didn't catch this originally, so when I caught the post of the Mother Jone's interview of John Perry Barlow, I jumped right in. In the "quick responses" section of the interview JPB is asked about the band Phish to which part of his response is "... I'm eager to hear them now that they're back together." "What!", I thought to myself - "Phish is back together."
This sent me down another Internet rabbit hole to see if I could confirm the information. Unfortunately all of my quick checks, Phish.com and LiveMusicBlog, confirmed no such reunion. I went back to the Mother Jone's interview to check the date - February 3, 2003. So much for my short-lived excitement.
But what did strike me was the timeliness of the interview. What JPB talked about during the interview was similar to our discussion back in August 2005 and just as relevant today. - Ed
One of the last official acts I did as the editor for TheMusicNeverStopped.net was to talk with John Perry Barlow. The tenth anniversary of Jerry Garcia's, lead guitarist for the band the Grateful Dead, passing was coming up and I wanted to get his thoughts on the subject as well as discuss a few other "music" and "digital rights" related topics.
Actually, my intention was to just schedule an interview with him at the time but when I called the phone number, I found that I was talking with him directly. This put me a little off guard but he was very accommodating and we spoke for about an hour.
I still remember when I told him the name of the web site I represented, he responded by saying, "I wrote that song." At that moment it seemed like things had come full circle.
Unfortunately, I never got a chance to broadcast the interview on the TMNS.net PodCast. I still remember much of our conversation and perhaps should relay it here as a post on this site - but that will have to wait for another time.
In the meantime, Here's an interview [via Scripting News] with John Perry Barlow done for Mother's Jones magazine in which he discusses the current state of information privacy, the apathetic nature of suburbanites as it relates to the erosion of civil liberties, both cyber and physical, file sharing, and other relevant thoughts.