"Hacker Crackdown.Part 4.THE CIVIL LIBERTARIANS" - читать интересную книгу автора (Sterling Bruce)

Barlow, but they commonly dusted themselves off and
hurried on as if nothing had happened. It was as if it were
*too much to believe* that a 1960s freak from the Grateful
Dead had taken on a federal law enforcement operation
head-to-head and *actually seemed to be winning!*

Barlow had no easily detectable power-base for a
political struggle of this kind. He had no formal legal or
technical credentials. Barlow was, however, a computer
networker of truly stellar brilliance. He had a poet's gift of
concise, colorful phrasing. He also had a journalist's
shrewdness, an off-the-wall, self-deprecating wit, and a
phenomenal wealth of simple personal charm.

The kind of influence Barlow possessed is fairly
common currency in literary, artistic, or musical circles. A
gifted critic can wield great artistic influence simply
through defining the temper of the times, by coining the
catch-phrases and the terms of debate that become the
common currency of the period. (And as it happened,
Barlow *was* a part-time art critic, with a special fondness
for the Western art of Frederic Remington.)

Barlow was the first commentator to adopt William
Gibson's striking science-fictional term "cyberspace" as a
synonym for the present-day nexus of computer and
telecommunications networks. Barlow was insistent that
cyberspace should be regarded as a qualitatively new
world, a "frontier." According to Barlow, the world of
electronic communications, now made visible through the
computer screen, could no longer be usefully regarded as
just a tangle of high-tech wiring. Instead, it had become a
*place,* cyberspace, which demanded a new set of
metaphors, a new set of rules and behaviors. The term, as
Barlow employed it, struck a useful chord, and this
concept of cyberspace was picked up by *Time,*
*Scientific American,* computer police, hackers, and
even Constitutional scholars. "Cyberspace" now seems
likely to become a permanent fixture of the language.

Barlow was very striking in person: a tall, craggy-
faced, bearded, deep-voiced Wyomingan in a dashing
Western ensemble of jeans, jacket, cowboy boots, a
knotted throat-kerchief and an ever-present Grateful
Dead cloisonne lapel pin.

Armed with a modem, however, Barlow was truly in
his element. Formal hierarchies were not Barlow's strong
suit; he rarely missed a chance to belittle the "large
organizations and their drones," with their uptight,