Conference considers digital age Cyberspace thinker links bin Laden, Net

CAMDEN — Osama bin Laden and the Internet – or at least what each represents – have been on a collision course for years.

Long before the 757s crashed into the Twin Towers, John Perry Barlow believes, two warring impulses have been at work in the world.

Barlow is a modern Renaissance man whose resume includes song-writing for the Grateful Dead and cattle ranching in Wyoming. He’s currently on a fellowship at the Harvard Law School. He spoke Sunday morning at the annual Pop!Tech conference in Camden, an international gathering of thinkers who consider the implications of the digital age.

In 1991, he wrote that there would be a holy war in the coming years, because some groups of people would believe their culture was under attack by another culture or an organism, as Barlow terms such things as multinational corporations and global networks like the Internet.

“I really do believe that ideas are life-forms,” he told the packed house at the Camden Opera House.

“Openness was going to be regarded as a threat,” he predicted a decade ago. The current conflict came about because parts of the Islamic world rejected being part of the emerging global community, he said.

The Internet means that “a thought can spread instantaneously to everyone on the planet who might be interested,” he explained, which in turn means that leaders can no longer control the masses.

“I’d hoped we might have a bloodless conflict,” Barlow said, but the events of Sept. 11 proved otherwise.

The 21st century may now be dominated by the struggle between open systems and closed systems, he said.

Barlow drew a parallel to Guttenberg’s refinement of the printing press, which he said presaged “400 years of continuous bloodshed,” ending with World War II.

“I had a realization on Sept. 11,” he said. “I’d had this realization before. Whatever you want to say about Osama bin Laden, he’s gotten our attention, and no one else has been able to do this.”

When the telegraph was first invented in 1847, Barlow said, it marked the beginning of a new age – now dominated by the Internet – because it was the first time two people separated by distance “were in the same mental space.”

Barlow, who is credited with coining the term “cyberspace,” said he believes ideas and the networks by which they are communicated are, in essence, alive.

“What we’re creating are as real as rabbits, but just don’t happen to be based on carbon,” he said of the Internet. And he believes people “shouldn’t handle ideas as if they’re no different than toasters.”

Multinational corporations, Barlow asserted, are in competition with humans.

“They’re collective organisms,” he said, which exist to pursue market share and focus on nothing but the next fiscal quarter.

Barlow said he resists what he called the conglomeration of “content control,” which mergers of firms that own movie studios, television networks and Internet sites represent. That control is not unlike the control exercised by Hitler in Germany and by the Soviets for much of the 20th century, “because there is no countervailing argument allowed,” he said.

“We cannot allow any more of those ‘hives’ to be created,” he said.

“We have to respond to the actions of a closed system by being as open as possible,” Barlow said near the conclusion of the question-and-answer session that followed his hour-long remarks. “Just as the answer to terror is courage, the answer to hatred is love.”