from the EFFector -- To Be at Liberty by John Perry Barlow

[David Farber <farber@central.cis.upenn.edu>]

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To Be at Liberty
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John Perry Barlow wrote this essay for an upcoming PBS special on liberty. 
This is the text of what will be a quarter of the show. The other three
essayists include Salman Rushdie.


To Be At Liberty
An Essay for Public Television

Text by John Perry Barlow 
Video production by Todd Rundgren

Let me tell you where I'm coming from.  I grew up on a ranch near Pinedale,
Wyoming, a very free town not far from the middle of nowhere. 

It was the kind of place where a state legislator could actually say, "If
the English language was good enough for our Lord Jesus Christ, it's good
enough for our school children."

Though surely a hick town, it was also a real community.  There was a lot
of trust.  Neither the locks nor the lawyers got used much.  People knew
each other and tried to let one another be.  After all, they'd come to that
wild and remote place to be free.  Liberty was a fierce practice among
them.  That it might also be a legal guarantee seemed irrelevant.

It seems to me that elsewhere in America, liberty is far more a matter of
law than practice.  The Bill of Rights is still on the books, and they'd
have a hell of a time putting you in jail for just saying something, but
how free are we?

Whatever the guarantees, I believe liberty resides in its exercise. Liberty
is really about the ability to feel free and behave accordingly. You are
only as free as you act.

Free people must be willing to speak up...and listen.  They can't merely
consume the fruits of freedom, they have to produce them.

This exercise of liberty requires that people trust one another and the
institutions they make together. They have to feel at home in their
society.

Well, Americans don't appear to trust each other much these days. Why else
would we employ three times more lawyers per capita than we did in 1970?  

Why else would our universities be so determined to impose tolerance that
they'll expel you for saying what you think and never notice the irony?

Why else would we teach our kids to fear all strangers? Why else have we
become so afraid to look one another in the eye? 

We have come to regard trust as foolishness and fear as necessary.  We live
in terror that the people around us might figure out what we're actually
thinking.  

Frankly, this America doesn't feel very free to me at all.  What has
happened to our liberty?  

I think much of the answer lies in the critical difference between
information and experience. 

These days we view most of our world through a television screen. Most of
our knowledge comes from information about things, not experience with
them.

Let me return to Pinedale for an example.  Those folks killed each other
pretty regularly, but there wasn't much fear. They knew each other, and if
somebody got shot, it wasn't too hard to figure out why.

Homicide was not abstract. It was a familiar threat, like wild horses or winter.

And you also knew that today's opponent might be the only person along to
pull you out of a snowdrift tomorrow.  So tolerance and trust were
practical necessities.  Living more or less safely in a world we
understood, we found liberty an easy thing to keep.

But elsewhere, as I say, the average American's sense of the world has
likely been derived by staring at it through the one-way tunnel of
information. 

What the media's taught my fellow citizens is that all the world is
dangerous in some irrational, non-specific way. Terrorists are everywhere.
Nature is in open rebellion. Making love can kill you. Your fellow humans
are liars in suits, thugs, zealots, psychopaths, and, mostly, victims who
look a lot like you.

Television amplifies the world's mayhem and gives you no way to talk back.
No way to ask, "Is this the way the world is?"  Just as right now it's
giving you no way to argue with me.

Why does television prefer terrifying images?  Because it lives on your
attention.  That's what television is really selling.  And scaring the hell
out of you is, like sex, one of those really efficient ways to get your
undivided focus.  To gain it, they flood your living room with images
designed to hit your fear glands like electricity.

So we have erected a glowing altar in the center of our lives that feeds on
our terror, and Fear has become our national religion.  

We ask the government to defend us against the virtual goblins that stream
from the tube, and the government has obliged us.

For example, in 1992, a total of two Americans died in terrorist attacks. 
Not what I'd call a major threat. But our fear of them is so real that we
spend tens of billions a year to protect ourselves from terrorism. For many
Americans, making the car payments depends on keeping this fear alive.

But you cannot build a society of general trust in an atmosphere of general
fear. The fearful are never free.

If we are to fight back - if we are to regain the courage necessary to the
practice of liberty - we are going to have to stage another kind of
revolution.  We need to find a new means of understanding the world that
takes no profit from our fear.  

We need a medium that, like life itself, allows us to probe it for the
truth. We need, in essence, to cut out the middlemen and speak directly to
one another.  Indeed, we need a place where we can share information
unfiltered by the needs and desires of either Big Brother or the Marketing
Department down at Channel Six.

Such a medium may be spreading across the planet in a thickening web of
connected computers called the "Internet."  Through the Internet I can
already get a personal connection with people all over the globe, learning
from those on the scene what's really going on.  Through the Internet I can
publish my own understandings to whomever might be interested, in whatever
numbers.

During the War in the Persian Gulf, I was able to get minute by minute
reports from the laptop computers of soldiers in the field.  The picture
they presented felt far more detailed, more troubling and ambiguous, than
the mass hallucination presented on CNN. 

The Internet is also creating a new place...many call it Cyberspace...where
new communities like Pinedale can form. The big difference will be that
these Cyberspace communities will be possible among people whose bodies are
located in many different places in the world.

Direct communication should breed understanding and tolerance.  Our fears
will be far easier to check out.  We may begin to understand that these
distant and sometimes alien creatures are real people whose rights are
directly connected to our own.  

I imagine the gathering places of Cyberspace, some as intimate as
Pinedale's Wrangler Cafe, some more vast than Tienanmen Square.  I imagine
us meeting there in conditions of trust and liberty that no government will
be able to deny.

I imagine a world, quite soon to come, in which ideas can spread like fire,
as Jefferson said, "expansible over all space, without lessening their
density at any point, and like the air in which we breathe... incapable of
confinement or exclusive appropriation by anyone."

If ideas can spread like fire, then freedom, like water, will flow around
or over those that stand in its way.  In Cyberspace, I hope that this truth
will be self-evident.