Jack In, Young Pioneer!
Keynote Essay for the 1994 Computerworld College Edition
by John Perry Barlow

I'm entering these characters aboard the M.V. Matanuska, an Alaskan ferry
headed up the Inside Passage, south of Juneau. The fog is so dense that the
bow is not visible from the bridge. Morning sunlight pouring in from the
top of it illuminates the whole into a blazing haze of featureless glory
and peril. The Future.

Almost exactly a century ago, such fog banks were stuffed with stampeders
of the last great gold rush on this continent. The flood of raw hopefuls
who headed to the Yukon in 1898 were nearly the last Americans to heed the
advice of the great newspaper publisher and windbag Horace Greeley, who
proclaimed what was probably the motto of the 19th Century when he
exhorted: "Go west, young man!"

By that time, the Yukon and Alaska were about as far west as they could go.
Already every other North American frontier had been scribbled over with
the graffiti of civilization.

Only a few years before, in 1875, my own family...a restless gene which had
been farming recently cleared ground since the 1600's...moved into the
upper reaches of the Green River Basin of Wyoming and thus deflowered the
only frontier available to them without doing something as crazy as heading
for the Arctic. There they came to a bewildered halt.

So I grew up resenting that the noble, essentially human, act of plunging
off into unassayed wilderness, driven by nothing more rational than vague
dissatisfaction and aspiration, would not be mine to undertake. It was the
critical part of my inheritance which my forbears had spent.

It turns out I was not quite right about that. Today another frontier yawns
before us, far more fog-obscured and inscrutable in its opportunities than
the Yukon. It consists not of unmapped physical space in which to assert
one's ambitious body, but unmappable, infinitely expansible cerebral space.
Cyberspace. And we are all going there whether we want to or not.

We must seek our future in the virtual world because there is no economic
room left in the physical one. Not only has all the good farmland been
homesteaded long since, but nearly all the work one might do with his or
her hands is now being done either by machines or by people from parts of
the world where what's considered a living wage is a lot less than you'd
likely accept.

So the engines of history have other plans for us. Save a few Amish and
survivalists, we have all been swallowed by the cultural superorganism of
digital technology, a beast now well beyond anyone's control, and it is
slouching off to Cyberspace with us in its belly. Since it's inevitable, I
would suggest we make peace with our fate, rather as though we were Jonah
setting up a permanent settlement inside the whale.

I did try my personal best to resist conscription as a Knowledge Worker. I
spent 17 years running the family ranch in Wyoming before I came to this. I
fed cattle every winter morning from a hay sled drawn by four Belgian
workhorses. I lived horseback, without lawyers or locks. I made my living
from things I could touch, and far too usually smell, very much a creature
of the physical world.

But I was as culturally doomed as the Tasaday of New Guinea. Technology had
so empowered my competitors with fertilizer, growth hormones, and
computerized futures hedging programs, that only a few of us were necessary
to feed those remaining Americans who still eat beef. Such atavistic
practices as mine were like stone axes against smart bombs.

Yanked from the 19th Century, I found myself, like you, tossed
unceremoniously onto the doorstep of the 21st.

So here we are, plunging through the fog, unsure of where we're headed but
making excellent time. While I may have serious doubts about being forced
to emigrate to a place where I can't even bring my body, I can no longer
complain about belonging to the first generation in the recorded history of
my family to be done out of a frontier to fling itself into.

This frontier, the Virtual World, offers opportunities and perils like no
other before it. Entering it, we are engaging what will likely prove the
most transforming technological event since the capture of fire. I have a
terrible feeling that your children, by the time they are my age, would be
barely recognizable to me as human, so permanently jacked in to The Great
Mind will they be.

I could be wrong about this, of course. Sweeping predictions about the
future have a way of turning their authors into fools after a few decades.
Our envisioned trajectories usually turn out to be a lot more fractal than
plotted. The Big Events are never seen in advance.

A few days ago, I passed through Seattle, a place I first visited on the
occasion of the 1961 Seattle World's Fair, which also called itself the
Century 21 Expo. The Fair was filled with depictions of Seattle at the
Millennium, a place where the Space Needle would be more the architectural
norm than the quaint artifact it seems today.  The chief feature of these
projections was a glistening transportation web from Vancouver to Portland
around which the citizens would be whisked in 200 mph automatic pods. The
only prediction of these which came true was that the Burbs would
metastasize the full circumference of Puget Sound.

Absolutely nobody predicted the extent to which little beige bit-spitting
boxes would become the substrate of civilization in the 90's.  Certainly no
one foresaw that the mysterious stuff which lived in those boxes and made
them spit their bits would become the economic staple of SeattlePlex. And,
even in an event which  Bill Gates' prominent Seattle parents surely must
have taken a hand in, no one came close to predicting such a thing as Bill
Gates.

So, although we should be humble in our projections, and while the present
moment is probably weirder than any previous, there are a few things which
we can learn from previous frontier settlement.

At the moment it seems that the most important of these is that government
will come. Such combinations of unpredictability, massive change, peril,
and opportunity as are found on any frontier are to government like blood
to a great white shark. This is because government lives in part to
diminish unpredictability. The kind of economic free-for-all which smells
like opportunity to the freebooter represents another kind of opportunity
for the bureaucrat. And over the long run, it has traditionally been the
bureaucrat who prevailed.

Thus, if one goes to the Yukon today, he finds very few gold miners (or,
for that matter, entrepreneurs of any sort). About seventy percent of the
people who are in that economically stagnant region work for some form of
government. Most of them are the spiritual descendents of Sgt. Preston,
whose real-life Mounty counterparts were dispatched into the economic wilds
of Dawson and Skagway to impose social decency on the stampeders.

There is a cycle of frontier inhabitation which has usually gone like this:
Misfits and dreamers, rejected by or rejecting society, are pushed out into
the margins. There they set up camp and maintain what little order they
want in it by unwritten codes, the honor of thieves, the Code of the West.

Despite their usual haplessness, they discover resources and start
exploiting them. Burghers and boosters back in the civilized regions hear
of these discoveries. Settlers, a milder sort, come in with their women and
children and are repelled by the savagery and license of their
predecessors, whether mountain men, prospectors, or Indians. They send for
troops to secure the frontier for the Rotary Club and the PTA. They elect
representatives, pass laws, and, pretty soon, they've created another place
which is boring but which at least appears predictable.

Already we can find the usual Christian soldiers massing at the borders of
Cyberspace. Whether their instruments of entry are the FBI's Digital
Telephony proposal (which proposes to hard-wire the Net for automated
surveillance) or the NSA's Clipper Chip (which would allow you to lock your
digital door, but only if the government kept a key) or well-meaning
legislative efforts ensure equal access to the Net, or increasingly
punitive props in the collapsing structure of copyright law, or pure,
blue-nosed priggishness, the government is preparing to place this new
frontier under the rule of law. Whether the pioneers already there want it
or not.

There are, however, some critical differences between this frontier and its
predecessors. For one thing, while there was no question that the
government in Ottawa had legitimate jurisdiction over the Yukon, the same
could not be said of the relationship between Washington and Cyberspace.

Cyberspace, being a region of mind rather than geography, is simultaneously
everywhere and nowhere. There are no national borders. The only boundaries
which are significant are those which one crosses by entering a password.
The location of those systems is irrelevant.

What difference does it make that the actual whereabouts of a hard disk is,
say, California, when one may as easily actuate its heads from a keyboard
in Berlin as from the desk it sits on? The Internet is essentially one
great machine (or, better, organism) all elements of which are continuous
if wide-flung.

Nevertheless, the American government maintains the conceit that someone
moving encryption software from a hard disk in California region of that
great digital Critter to another in the Berlin region would be engaged in
the illegal international shipment of embargoed arms.

Or take the case of a Cupertino, California couple who were recently
convicted on federal charges of distributing materials deemed pornographic
according to the community standards of Memphis, Tennessee.

In both of these case, a local government is trying to apply its ordinances
upon all of Cyberspace, and thus the entire planet. This might work for a
time. Because of the American origins of the Internet, Cyberspace seems
"ours," rather as Panama once did. This won't last long. As increasing
numbers of non-Americans jack in, even such little willingness to submit to
Washington as now exists will cease.

And it's unlikely that any new external power will arise in Washington's
place. The Internet was designed to survive nuclear ordnance raining down
all over it. This required that it be headless and self-organizing. It is
thereby as resistant to Washington's efforts to control it as it would have
been to Soviet efforts to decapitate it. It is the largest functional
anarchy the world has ever known and is likely to stay that way.

Thus, the electronic frontier also differs from its predecessors in that
setting up reservations is not likely to suffice for corralling the
natives. As digital pioneer John Gilmore said, "The Internet deals with
censorship as though it were a malfunction. It routes around it."
Furthermore, unreal estate is unlimited. Unlike land, they are making more
of this stuff. If you don't like the politics of the system you're on, you
can set up your own for the price of a clone and increasingly cheap
Internet connection.

There is, in addition, an irresolvable mismatch between the accelerating
pace of technology and the changes it will enact upon the terrain of
Cyberspace and the geological ponderousness with which the conventional
legal structure of any jurisdiction, physical or virtual, can adapt to
those changes.

Unfortunately, while governments have been good at imposing limitations,
they show little capacity for accepting their own. Personally, I don't
believe that government as we've known it as a promising future. I think
the terrestrial powers will pursue us into Cyberspace and die of confusion
there, thrashing  arbitrarily and crushing miscellaneous unfortunates as
they do. Like rabid dinosaurs, the fact that they're doomed will not make
them any less dangerous.

And while I have some faith that the netizens will eventually find
appropriate and effective means for securing as much order as they want, I
also expect that various sorts of bad craziness will afflict them for some
time to come. Skagway, 1900 might look like a nice place to raise a family
compared to Cyberspace, 2000.

It is because of these twin co-evolving perilous opportunities that Mitch
Kapor and I founded the Electronic Frontier Foundation back in 1994. At the
time, we perceived our narrow purpose as being the protection of digital
expression and the enhancement of digital community.

Now EFF's expanding charter extends to resisting the last ditch efforts of
the old Industrial Age powers to colonize and subdue Cyberspace, while
helping the folks who pass much of their lives there to find practical
means for ordering their own affairs. I hope you will join that effort,
either with us or by independently struggling toward your own approaches to
these problems.

And don't be dismayed. Jack in. Go to Cyberspace, and go with all the
adrenaline and goofy optimism which ought to accompany frontier enterprise.
As I say, I don't think you have much choice, so you might as well make the
best of it.

But don't come to this wild place expecting to civilize it, as I once did.
This frontier may well be permanent And, finding bedlam, please don't send
for your troops. They will only get in the way of a future which you will
have to invent yourselves.


The Inside Passage
Thursday, August 11, 1994


John Perry Barlow is a retired cattle rancher, a lyricist for the Grateful
Dead, a cognitive dissident, and co-founder of the Electronic Frontier
Foundation. He lives in Wyoming, New York, and Cyberspace. He is the father
of three daughters and is actually very optimistic.