John Barlow conveys heartfelt greetings to the sopa copiers and supporters: lecture in Russia

John Perry Barlow is the man who created the “Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace” in 1996, an active opponent of SOPA and similar acts, a researcher of social phenomena related to the Internet and a serious enemy of any copywriter.

This week he had a very “hot” lecture in Digital October, in which he told what and who influences the network, how the government seeks to limit information exchange and who is opposing it.
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Main:

The Internet by its architecture is a network that cannot be limited.
States and large companies are trying to limit the exchange of information. It changes the Internet, but the Internet also changes the outside world.
The network creates a new model of management and information exchange, which shows how outdated existing institutions and methods.

About the Internet and nuclear bombs

John began by welcoming those who almost destroyed his country with nuclear weapons. It seems that he is very happy that both the United States and Russia still exist and, as a result, have not exchanged nuclear "presentations." From military topics, he almost immediately turned to the creation of the Internet:

“I remember very well the bunker in Cheyenne Mountain, where the NORAD system was located. She was hidden in a fairly deep mountain bunker in case of nuclear war. At that time there were people at the Pentagon, in particular, Paul Barron, who was then working for the military company RAND Corporation. He just came up with the technology of packet switching, which formed the basis of a decentralized network, which became the basis of the Internet.

John says that he later talked to a representative of RAND, who spoke about the pre-established distribution of the network. We used to think that it was necessary to preserve functionality after a nuclear strike - but the developers designed the architecture not only with this requirement in mind, but also immediately thought that religious organizations and law enforcement agencies also should not have the technical ability to restrict information exchange.

We are very lucky that such people stood at the origins of the Internet. They were well aware of what they were doing, and for some time no one followed them. I remember well my acquaintance with Vint Cerf. In principle, the creation of the Internet is attributed to many people. But it seems to me that Vint Serf has more rights to this title - the “father of the Internet” than anyone else. It was he who invented what later became known as the TCP \ IP protocol. It was a completely new idea of combining the most diverse in their structure, in their stuffing computers, building horizontal communication mechanisms between them. Well, instead of issuing these network protocols only to the Pentagon, Vint Cerf published them, made them widely available, knowing well, of course, that the Pentagon would not approve of his decision, especially since he gave the money to develop this protocol.

It is interesting that Cerf understood perfectly well that the published protocols would still be used - because without them, the Pentagon simply cannot achieve the solution to its task. By publishing data on TCP \ IP, Surf ensured equality for future network participants.

Google and Facebook control the network.

Over the past 25 years, social networking has changed dramatically. Today, Google and Facebook can cause real cyclones on the Internet: in fact, these companies can dictate their rules and restrict the free flow of information in the structure that we considered decentralized.

According to Barlow, he spoke with representatives of both companies. In informal conversations, they admit that they take an outrageous position. On the other hand, the policy of such companies is quite easy to understand: after all, this is, in fact, political power.

About copywriting

On the other hand, there are many social institutions that are already outdated, but are trying to survive due to a system of prohibitions. It is logical that it made sense to prohibit when the information was tied to physical media: books can be burned, disks - destroyed. Now the situation has changed dramatically. First of all it concerns the distribution of objects of creativity - people can get money for their creative works. Distributing companies, in fact, are engaged in packaging in one form or another of such products: the balance is clearly not in their direction. It is for this reason that the economy of cyberspace should be revised: the main postulate - it is impossible to limit any information resource in the virtual world.

Barlow himself earned by writing lyrics for several bands. Back in the 1960s, one of "his" groups, the Grateful Dead, allowed anyone to record concerts. Now it would be called viral marketing, but then it seemed that the fans of the group could take pictures and take notes. It was the distribution of amateur tapes that ensured the success of the group. Of course, the large recording studios do not like this model at all.

And in such matters there is not much difference between corporations and states.

About the state

The state is still trying to control the thoughts of its citizens. And the surest way to censor, control the brains of its citizens is to doze access to information, and for this it is necessary to approve the absolute right of the state to dispose of it. About two weeks ago we had a big victory. We have achieved the rejection of two laws by the US Congress: the infamous SOPA and PIPA.

At the same time, in the mass of other countries, parliaments ratify a similar law, a trade agreement aimed at combating counterfeit goods. In many countries, these decisions are made without any public discussion at all, although, in fact, there are not very many differences with SOPA / PIPA.

It seems to me that we are now seeing with you, perhaps one of the last, deathbed attempts, outdated state models, outdated states to subjugate the information field.

Discussion

The most interesting part of the lecture is a discussion. To begin with, Anton Nosik (SUP Media Director) recalled that Barlow had once participated in the rejection of the bill submitted by Clinton - and therefore he almost certainly knew that SOPA / PIPA would not pass.

No, I can not say that I had such confidence. The fact is that the American government in general and both houses of Parliament have an amazing quality not to see the obvious.

Barlow participated in the story with Betamax, helped Napster, "lit up" with Pirate Bay and in many other similar cases. He believes that similar processes will take place in Russia soon - and the new future of information exchange will differ from the current situation. Spout gives an example:

... the person sitting directly to my right (his name is Vasily ...), works in RIA Novosti. This is a state news agency that receives billions of dollars in taxpayer money. That is, in principle, Vasily could play on the side of VV Putin, and with all of this, he is a libertarian, and he also has access to a huge amount of Soviet photographs and texts and is struggling to bring this entire library to public access. Not because some revolutionaries demanded it, but because he considers it right. This is his own initiative, despite the fact that this initiative does not enjoy any approval from above. Well, at some point it was all discussed with the president, and the president supported this concept. But you could have covered access to all this information. So I am very pleased that there are libertarians in state structures.

Vasily Gatov joined the dialogue:

... Vint Cerf was already mentioned here and, most likely, Peter Schwartz, well-known to you, who in recent years have spoken much about the need for a complete revision of Internet security protocols, in order to reform the distribution of identity on the Internet. I do not know the position of Tim Berners-Lee on this issue, but I understand that wwwc also supports the general idea. I want to know the position of the EFF on this issue. And in short, what do you think about the future of TCP / IP? And if we give states to introduce some kind of new protocols or create infrastructure, the output will be an absolutely non-transparent, closed system, which will be very difficult to fight. What do you think about this?

Barlow believes that complete anonymization and accurate identification can exist together: he reminds us of TOR and the fact that, for example, you can only authenticate when it is really necessary. This is similar to the permission of a kortkostvola: firearms will be useful in a critical situation, but you shouldn’t use them every day. At the protocol level, now there is everything so that the user can be anonymously most of the time and can log in precisely if necessary.

At the same time, the ability to accurately network authentication (like a passport) does not mean a significant change in the social environment: it is too early to talk about serious changes affecting the state as a whole.

Then Boris Dolgin (polit.ru) asked about the model of access to the content and reminds about the famous photographer Plato, who prohibits the commercial use of his photos, but is happy when cartoons are drawn on them or when they are worn at rallies. Spout explains for Barlow features of domestic law, after which John recalled that the concept of Creative Commons suggests something similar. When they were in the band they allowed everyone to record the concerts, they simply politely asked them not to use them for commercial purposes - and it worked.

Barlow about Wikileaks:

... I believe that secrecy and secrecy are too great a risk for society. And governments want to hide from public attention. The more this attention will be, the better for society.

After that, Oleg Nesterov (musician) and John talked about music online, the possibility of co-creation (it’s too early), lively feelings of experiences that aren’t online. Discusses the process of joint development of software and its arrangement on music.

Summary

John says that, on the one hand, his task and his supporters are to bring the end of the old management model closer, and on the other hand, it is already clear that completely new management mechanisms are being formed. They are not like a hierarchy, but rather something like a “local initiative.”