irtual-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 notions of
consistency. In the late 1980s, this Republican rock lyricist cattle
rancher sold his ranch and became a computer telecommunications devotee.

The free-spirited Barlow made this transition with ease. He genuinely
enjoyed computers. With a beep of his modem, he leapt from small-town
Pinedale, Wyoming, into electronic contact with a large and lively
crowd of bright, inventive, technological sophisticates from all over
the world. Barlow found the social milieu of computing attractive: its
fast-lane pace, its blue-sky rhetoric, its open-endedness. Barlow
began dabbling in computer journalism, with marked success, as he was a
quick study, and both shrewd and eloquent. He frequently travelled to
San Francisco to network with Deadhead friends. There Barlow made
extensive contacts throughout the Californian computer community,
including friendships among the wilder spirits at Apple.

In May 1990, Barlow received a visit from a local Wyoming agent of the
FBI. The NuPrometheus case had reached Wyoming.

Barlow was troubled to find himself under investigation in an area of
his interests once quite free of federal attention. He had to struggle
to explain the very nature of computer-crime to a headscratching local
FBI man who specialized in cattle-rustling. Barlow, chatting helpfully
and demonstrating the wonders of his modem to the puzzled fed, was
alarmed to find all "hackers" generally under FBI suspicion as an evil
influence in the electronic community. The FBI, in pursuit of a hacker
called "NuPrometheus," were tracing attendees of a suspect group called
the Hackers Conference.

The Hackers Con