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

The Grateful Dead are not conventional players in
the American power establishment. They nevertheless
are something of a force to be reckoned with. They have a
lot of money and a lot of friends in many places, both
likely and unlikely.

The Dead may be known for back-to-the-earth
environmentalist rhetoric, but this hardly makes them
anti-technological Luddites. On the contrary, like most
rock musicians, the Grateful Dead have spent their entire
adult lives in the company of complex electronic
equipment. They have funds to burn on any sophisticated
tool and toy that might happen to catch their fancy. And
their fancy is quite extensive.

The Deadhead community boasts any number of
recording engineers, lighting experts, rock video mavens,
electronic technicians of all descriptions. And the drift
goes both ways. Steve Wozniak, Apple's co-founder, used
to throw rock festivals. Silicon Valley rocks out.

These are the 1990s, not the 1960s. Today, for a
surprising number of people all over America, the
supposed dividing line between Bohemian and technician
simply no longer exists. People of this sort may have a set
of windchimes and a dog with a knotted kerchief 'round its
neck, but they're also quite likely to own a multimegabyte
Macintosh running MIDI synthesizer software and trippy
fractal simulations. These days, even Timothy Leary
himself, prophet of LSD, does virtual-reality computer-
graphics demos in his lecture tours.

John Perry Barlow is not a member of the Grateful
Dead. He is, however, a ranking Deadhead.

Barlow describes himself as a "techno-crank." A
vague term like "social activist" might not be far from the
mark, either. But Barlow might be better described as a
"poet" -- if one keeps in mind Percy Shelley's archaic
definition of poets as "unacknowledged legislators of the
world."

Barlow once made a stab at acknowledged legislator
status. In 1987, he narrowly missed the Republican
nomination for a seat in the Wyoming State Senate.
Barlow is a Wyoming native, the third-generation scion of
a well-to-do cattle-ranching family. He is in his early
forties, married and the father of three daughters.

Barlow is not much troubled by other people's narrow