Net Guru John Perry Barlow - More Nervous Than Ever

[JackSpratts]

Wendy Grossman

" I'm not being hyperbolic about this," says John Perry Barlow, the self-styled "cognitive dissident", net prophet, former Grateful Dead lyricist and retired Wyoming cattle rancher. But he knows he's being hyperbolic and reveals with pride that the Lotus founder Mitch Kapor once told him that he needed a "hyperbolectomy".

He's entirely serious when he says that in three years the world we know could be wholly owned by corporations, with freedom of speech consigned to history. What shocks him most is how few people care or realise what's going on.

"There are two futures," he said at the Institute of Contemporary Art in London last Thursday. "One is entirely institutional, in which there will be one global corporate state, where large corporations direct every aspect of human endeavour and human beings have no choice but to go along with, it because we don't know any better. It's already taking place in the US."
http://news.independent.co.uk/digita...p?story=351058

- js.