John Perry Barlow is resident senator of cyberspace, and he's probably the first politician to play cyberspace. He basically holds an unelected office: he is in many ways the spokesperson representing the Internet to the outside world, and not to everybody's liking. Barlow is a humanist and in part a mystic, but he is also very technically savvy and eloquent. He has a long career ahead of him as the senator from cyberspace.

--THE SAINT (Kevin Kelly)

The Coyote

"Information is like a life jerky: dried up and not terribly communicative. Through information you come back to the vast set of phenomena that is creating the data in the first place. Experience and the universe itself are intimately bound up with one another. The purpose of the Internet and all its surrounding phenomena is to create a context where experience is universal, and the informational reduction is no longer necessary."

Any email from John Perry is a cyber-event. His emails may tell you he is a "Cognitive Dissident," cofounder, Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF, a group dedicated to preserving civil liberties in cyberspace), and that his home(stead) page is http://www.eff.org/~barlow. Or the email may chronicle Barlow in meatspace - today he's in France at the Hotel Martinez in Cannes, but soon he'll be passing through Amsterdam, Winston-Salem, San Francisco, San Jose, San Francisco, and Pinedale, Wyoming.

JOHN PERRY BARLOW is cofounder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a former lyricist for the Grateful Dead, and a former Wyoming cattle rancher.