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If You're Not Lost, You're Not Much Of An Explorer.

-John Perry Barlow

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If You're Not Lost,

John Perry Barlow

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If You're Not Lost, You're Not Much Of An Explorer.

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Imagine Discovering A Continent So Vast That It May Have No End To Its Dimensions. Imagine A New World With More Resources Than All Our Future Greed Might Exhaust, More Opportunities Than There Will Ever Be Entrepreneurs Enough To Exploit, And A Peculiar Kind Of Real Estate That Expands With Development. Imagine A Place Where Trespassers Leave No Footprints, Where Goods Can Be Stolen Infinite Number Of Times And Yet Remain In The Possession Of Their Original Owners, Where Business You Never Heard Of Can Own The History Of Your Personal Affairs.

I Personally Think Intellectual Property Is An Oxymoron. Physical Objects Have A Completely Different Natural Economy Than Intellectual Goods. It's A Tricky Thing To Try To Own Something That Remains In Your Possession Even After You Give It To Many Others.

I Have A Feeling Virtual Reality Will Further Expose The Conceit That 'reality' Is A Fact. It Will Provide Another Reminder Of The Seamless Continuity Between The World Outside And The World Within, Delivering Another Major Hit To The Old Fraud Of Objectivity. 'real,' As Kevin Kelly Put It, 'is Going To Be One Of The Most Relative Words We'll Have.'

The Future's Here, We Are It, We Are On Our Own

I Have Always Felt That No Matter How Inscrutable Its Ways And Means, The Universe Is Working Perfectly And Working According To A Greater Plan Than We Can Know.

I Come From Cyberspace, The New Home Of Mind. On Behalf Of The Future, I Ask You Of The Past To Leave Us Alone. You Are Not Welcome Among Us. You Have No Sovereignty Where We Gather.

I've Begun To Wonder If We Wouldn't Also Regard Spelunkers As Desperate Criminals If At&t Owned All The Caves.

Our Universities Are So Determined To Impose Tolerance That They'll Expel You For Saying What You Think And Never Notice The Irony

You Do Not Know Our Culture, Our Ethics, Or The Unwritten Codes That Already Provide Our Society More Order Than Could Be Obtained By Any Of Your Impositions.

The More You've Got, The Shorter It Feels.

The First Serious Infowar Is Now Engaged. The Field Of Battle Is Wikileaks. You Are The Troops.

So I'm Just Waiting Until One Party Or The Other Actually Gets A Moral Compass And A Backbone.

I Mean I Look Forward To The Day When I Can Be Republican Again.

The Corporate Impulse For Human Uniformity Instills Shame At Difference And, Thus, The Contemporary Zeal For Privacy.

Royalties Are Not How Most Writers Or Musicians Make Their Living. Musicians By And Large Make A Living With A Relationship With An Audience That Is Economically Harnessed Through Performance And Ticket Sales.

We Are In The Middle Of The Most Transforming Technological Event Since The Capture Of Fire.

If Someone Like Karl Rove Had Wanted To Neutralize The Most Creative, Intelligent, And Passionate Members Of His Opposition, He'd Have A Hard Time Coming Up With A Better Tool Than Burning Man. Exile Them To The Wilderness, Give Them A Culture In Which Alpha Status Requires Months Of Focus And Resource-consumptive Preparation, Provide Them With Metric Tons Of Psychotropic Confusicants, And Then... Ignore Them. It's A Pretty Safe Bet That They Won't Be Out Registering Voters, Or Doing Anything That Might Actually Threaten Electoral Change, When They Have An Art Car To Build.

But Generally Speaking, I Felt To Engage In The Political Process Was To Sully Oneself To Such A Degree That Whatever Came Out Wasn't Worth The Trouble Put In.

I'm Still Strongly Opposed To Antismoking Laws, Strongly Opposed To Any Law That Regulates Personal Behavior.

Personal Behavior

We Are Creating A World Where Anyone, Anywhere May Express His Or Her Beliefs, No Matter How Singular, Without Fear Of Being Coerced Into Silence Or Conformity.

But Groundless Hope, Like Unconditional Love, Is The Only Kind Worth Having.

We Cannot Separate The Air That Chokes From The Air Upon Which Wings Beat.

If You're Not Lost, You're Not Much Of An Explorer.

I ... Believe That Angels, Or Something Like Them, Sometimes Live Among Us, Hidden Within Our Fellow Human Beings.

New Solutions Win By Virtue Of Adoption, And They Don't Get Adopted If They're Bad Solutions.

I Don't Know That I Believe In The Supernatural, But I Do Believe In Miracles, And Our Time Together Was Filled With The Events Of Magical Unlikelihood.

Notions Of Property, Value, Ownership, And The Nature Of Wealth Itself Are Changing More Fundamentally Than At Any Time Since The Sumerians First Poked Cuneiform Into Wet Clay And Called It Stored Grain ... Few People Are Aware Of The Enormity Of This Shift And Fewer Of Them Are Lawyers Or Public Officials.

Humanity Seems Bent On Creating A World Economy Primarily Based On Goods That Take No Material Form. In Doing So, We May Be Eliminating Any Predictable Connection Between Creators And A Fair Reward For The Utility Others May Find In Their Works.

The Real Issue Is Control. The Internet Is Too Widespread To Be Easily Dominated By Any Single Government. By Creating A Seamless Global Economic Zone, Anti-sovereign And Unregulatable, The Internet Calls Into Question The Very Idea Of A Nation-state.

One May As Well Be Optimistic. The Road To Catastrophe Will Be Rougher If It's Paved With Dread.

With The Development Of The Internet...we Are In The Middle Of The Most Transforming Technological Event Since The Capture Of Fire. I Used To Think That It Was Just The Biggest Thing Since Gutenberg, But Now I Think You Have To Go Back Farther.

I Support Freedom Of Expression, No Matter Whose, So I Oppose Ddos Attacks Regardless Of Their Target... They're The Poison Gas Of Cyberspace.

When Cryptography Is Outlawed, Bayl Bhgynjf Jvyy Unir Cevinpl.

Incompetence Is A Double-edged Banana.

Most Libertarians Are Worried About Government But Not Worried About Business. I Think We Need To Be Worrying About Business In Exactly The Same Way We Are Worrying About Government.

The One Thing That I Know Government Is Good For Is Countervailing Against Monopoly. It's Not Great At That Either, But It's The Only Force I Know That Is Fairly Reliable.

In Cyberspace, The First Amendment Is A Local Ordinance.

One Can Imagine The Government's Problem. This Is All Pretty Magical Stuff To Them. If I Were Trying To Terminate The Operations Of A Witch Coven, I'd Probably Seize Everything In Sight. How Would I Tell The Ordinary Household Brooms From The Getaway Vehicles?

Hope Does Not Always Require Probability.

I'm A Member Of That Half Of The Human Race Which Is Inclined To Divide The Human Race Into Two Kinds Of People. My Dividing Line Runs Between The People Who Crave Certainty And The People Who Trust Chance.

The Internet Treats Censorship As A Malfunction And Routes Around It.

If All Ideas Have To Be Bought, Then You Have An Intellectually Regressive System That Will Assure You Have A Highly Knowledgeable Elite And An Ignorant Mass.

Ignorant Masses

Art Is A Service, Not A Product. Created Beauty Is A Relationship, And A Relationship With The Holy At That. Reducing Such Work To 'content' Is Like Praying In Swear Words. End Of Sermon. Back To Business.

God's Jokes Are The Soul's Curriculum.

Everyone Seems To Be Playing Well Within The Boundaries Of His Usual Rule Set. I Have Yet To Hear Anyone Say Something That Seemed Likely To Mitigate The Idiocy Of This Age.

I Had Always Thought That The Idea Of Love At First Sight Was One Of Those Things Invented By Lady Novelists From The South With Three Names.

We Will Create A Civilization Of The Mind In Cyberspace. May It Be More Humane And Fair Than The World Your Governments Have Made Before.

Out Of The Ashes Of The Music Business, Comes The Rebirth Of The Musician Business.

Relying On The Government To Protect Your Privacy Is Like Asking A Peeping Tom To Install Your Window Blinds.

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