ists investigating the controversy often
stumbled over the truth about 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," wit