Jack In, Young Pioneer! Keynote Essay for the 1994 Computerworld College Edition by John Perry Barlow I'm entering these characters aboard the Alaskan ferry Matanuska. We're headed up the Inside Passage toward Skagway. 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 glory and peril. The Future. Nearly a century ago, such fog banks were stuffed with stampeders of the last great gold rush on this continent. The raw hopefuls who hit the Yukon in 1898 were nearly the last Americans to heed the advice of that great windbag Horace Greeley, who 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 moved into 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, after many restless generations, they came to a bewildered halt. I grew up resenting that the noble, essentially human, act of plunging off into unassayed wilderness, driven by nothing but vague dissatisfaction and aspiration, would not be mine to undertake. This critical part of my inheritance my forbears had already spent. Turns out I was wrong 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 little economic room left in the physical one. The machines now do that kind of work. I did try my personal best to resist conscription as a Knowledge Worker. I spent 17 years ranching in Wyoming before I came to this. 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 doomed as a Tasaday tribesman. I hung up my spurs. Then, like most everyone else, I was swallowed by the cultural superorganism of digital technology, now 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. It's not all bad. 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 none before. 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. Nevertheless, while the present moment is probably weirder than any previous, there may be a few things which we can learn from previous frontier settlement. One of these is that government will come. Such chaos as is found on any frontier is to government like blood to a great white shark. Government lives to diminish unpredictability. What smells like opportunity to the freebooter represents another kind of opportunity for the bureaucrat. Usually, the bureaucrat prevails. Thus, if one goes to the Yukon today, he finds that about seventy percent of the people there work for some form of government. 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, they elect representatives, they pass laws, and, pretty soon, they've created another civilized simulation of certainty. Already we can find the usual Christian soldiers massing at the borders of Cyberspace. By more means than I have room to detail here, 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 Cyberspace and its wild 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 the hardware in which those passwords reside 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. As digital pioneer John Gilmore said, "The Internet deals with censorship as though it were a malfunction. It routes around it." Thus, the electronic frontier also differs from its predecessors in that no reservation is likely to contain the natives. Unreal estate is infinite. 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 an increasingly cheap Internet connection. There is, in addition, an irresolvable mismatch between the accelerating gallop of technology and the geological pace of legal adaptation. The law becomes easy to hack around. Personally, I don't believe that government as we've known it has a promising future. I think the terrestrial powers will pursue us into Cyberspace and die of confusion there, thrashing arbitrarily as they do. But, Like rabid dinosaurs, the fact that they're doomed will not make them any less dangerous. And while I have some unsupported 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 old Industrial Age powers like America to imperialize 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.
