John Perry Barlow, former Wyoming cattle rancher, traces his 1988 pivot from physical labor to cyberspace and argues the Internet is a new kind of community replacing material work.
Key Takeaways
Barlow sold the Bar Cross ranch in 1987 after concluding the US economy rewards information over physical goods; became a knowledge worker in 1988.
The WELL introduced him to online community as a social form: disembodied minds, stripped of bodies and pheromones, building something recognizable as human community through text alone.
He frames cyberspace as beginning with the telephone in 1876, not with computers, and identifies the Internet (then ~800,000 UNIX hosts, growing 25%/month) as its mature expression.
His core economic claim: most knowledge work is a giant make-work project while Asian manufacturing handles physical production; many workers would return to physical labor if viable.
Cyberspace mapped onto the Old West: unmapped terrain, absent social contracts, ambiguous property rights, and wild sociopaths operating without established law.
Hacker News Comment Review
Thin discussion; one commenter surfaced Barlow’s own prescient warning that future technological development could flatten cyberspace’s guerrilla terrain just as ranching flattened the physical West.
