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voicing a deep-seated belief, echoed by many others, that the Net's two-way, many-to-many communication has brought us something so new and special that it's almost sacred.

Barlow, whose business card styles him a "cognitive dissident," became one of cyberspace's few net.prophets in 1990, when he circulated on the Net a long article called "Crime and Puzzlement," part of which recounts a visit from an FBI agent who thought Barlow might be a hacker. Describing the scene as "Kafka in a clown suit," Barlow was dumbfounded by the agent's lack of technical knowledge, calling it an "immigrant's fear of a strange, new land." Barlow concluded that this ignorance was both disastrous and important. He had a point: 1990 was the year of the Operation Sun Devil raids, in which a lot of innocent computer users were caught in the undertow of an attempt to crack down on hacking. Barlow's account of his strange encounter got him a prompt visit from Lotus founder and fellow WELL user Mitch Kapor; jointly they decided to found the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) to lobby for the extension of our traditional civil liberties into cyberspace. For Barlow, who hates writing ("I'd rather pump out septic tanks"),[12] it established his credentials as someone with broad experience, a way with words, and a particular point of view that many in cyberspace shared, but that hadn't yet found a voice.

Barlow was that voice, and he followed up with other articles that codified most of the important issues facing the Net in the early 1990s. He analyzed the battles over the "guerrilla cryptography" program PGP in "Decrypting the Puzzle Palace" (1992). In "Jackboots on the Infobahn" (1994), he argued against Clipper, the U.S. government's proposals for retaining its control over the use of strong cryptography, considered a key technology necessary to support commercial activity over the Net. In "Selling Wine without Bottles: The Economy of Mind on the Global Net" (1994), he attacked attempts to redefine intellectual property laws, saying no amount of revision could possibly make them work in a digital era.[13] Barlow's own career followed the pattern outlined in that last article, as the wide circulation of his writings (for free) turned him into both an advocate for the Net and someone with the credibility to explain how it worked to business and legal folk. At a conference in Amsterdam in early 1996, Barlow compared this process to the career of the Grateful Dead, whose massive popularity and cult following was built on the band's habit of allowing free taping at all concerts.

One of the beliefs Barlow began propagating in early 1995 to anyone who would listen was the idea that cyberspace was by nature its own sovereign state that could not be governed by traditional means. Again his timing was exquisite: 1995 and 1996 were two years of intense pressure on the Net from all sides. In addition to the continuing battle over the legal status of cryptography, all kinds of governments from the United States to Singapore began attempting to impose controls on what kind of information could flow, and even the telephone companies began carping about the amount of time users tied up their phone lines (while frantically trying to launch their own Internet services).

Censorship was a hot-button issue on the Net long before the passage by the U.S. Congress of the Communications Decency Act as a rider to the Telecommunications Bill on February 7, 1996. The received wisdom is that it's just not possible. For once, the famous aphorism isn't Barlow's. Instead, it was coined by the Electronic Frontier Foundation's third co-founder, John Gilmore, who said, "The Net interprets censorship as damage, and routes around it."[14] This famous (at least on the Net) line makes the Net sound like a force of technology that can't be stopped. What it really reflects is the fact that once the technology exists and enough people are aware of it, circumvention of censorship will happen, and that the Net as a collection of human beings perceives censorship as a threat and bonds together against it.