[delichon]

I met JPB briefly once, after he spoke at a San Francisco tech conference in the mid '90s. He was a particularly charismatic man.

We were so hyped up about the internet in those days. He predicted that we were witnesses of the extinction of the authoritarian state at the hands of the people armed with this new tool. But were also locked in the closet with a dying dinosaur, and that's not a safe place to be.

Thirty years later the dinosaur still looks uncomfortably healthy to me, but the closet is still shrinking.

[throwanem]

I'm sure he was charismatic. So reputedly is Scott Siskind. Both have authored a lot of entertaining predictions. Each is or was so far as I know many things himself, but neither has ever even remotely approached the knowledge to practice even as a novice technologist. Windbags the both of them, in other words.

I respect some of his work, but none that lay in the vein you describe. To speak of a nonexistent territory's sovereignty, when it is solely "inhabited" by machines and people with physical names and addresses, is absurd and risible. Indeed Barlow's entire ignorant, ideologically propagandistic identitarian grift - an early precursor and lineal ancestor of Cliven Bundy and "sovereign citizens"/"freemen on the land"/"Qanon" alike - is in my view directly culpable for much of same and much else destructive about the accidents of the technology's development to date.

And what he produced that does have merit, so far as I can tell, as here lacks all originality.