Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2018/06/05/barlovian.html
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Awesome! Looking forward to reading it.
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Nothing against the guy, and I don’t want to start a feud, but…
It always bugs me to hear Barlow described as “Grateful Dead lyricist”, when the lyrics to nearly all the best original Dead tunes were penned by Robert Hunter.
I love the idea of a rancher riding the range and musing on the noosphere.
I think I’ll need to buy this. Barlow is a bit of a paradox for me as a free thinker countercultural activist and at the same time a sometime Republican and very rich right-wing Libertation who once voted for George Wallace. After reading Fred Turner’s “From Counterculture to Cyberculture” I have a very ambiguous feeling about this contercultural notion of liberation through computers, especially Stewart Brand’s ideas of disembodied communities, once again, the noosphere.
Like, sympathetic and well-meaning ideas that have caused a lot of harm 'round Silicon Valley and, in the case of Stewart Brand and WIRED Magazine, were never very “counter”-cultural after all - rather, feeding right into the predatory capitalism we suffer under today, becoming one of its cultural underpinnings.
And yet, Barlow also seems to have been a genuinely free spirit, maybe in the tradition of Whitman of Thoreau. So I will have to buy his memoir.
But I will not buy it on Amazon. Nobody should buy anything on Amazon, ever. A company with these union-busting practices doesn’t deserve any of our dollars.
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