John Perry Barlow

I was very sorry to hear about the death of John Perry Barlow, one of the great influences on my life in technology.

 

 

One of my happiest memories of is having dinner with John and cypherpunk founder Eric Hughes, along Nicholas Negroponte, and having a discussion about the use of cryptography to deliver transparency (I was - and still am - sure that Eric’s “open book accounting” has a role to play in creating a new financial services infrastructure).

I remember being on a panel with John at a Vanguard executive summit thing in New York. It must have been mid-2000s, maybe 2005 or 2006. The topic of smart cards came up, and I told John that American banks were reluctant to start issuing them. He asked me why, so I told him it was because they were invented in France. He suggested that Gemplus rename them “Freedom Cards”, which still makes me chuckle thinking about it more than a decade later.

I probably only met him a dozen times, but he was unfailingly nice and I greatly enjoyed his company. Above all, he was interesting about cyberspace, virtual worlds and the future of society, things that need impassioned visionaries to be interesting about them, and I thank his memory for that.