In a lot of ways, the band prefigured Internet culture. When I first went looking for Deadheads on Usenet, it turned out that this was a good place to find them because it was the only available agora that could then be had. It was a pure connection, and so I was slotted in. By virtue of having been associated so closely with the Dead, I obtained a lot of unearned authority, but that was okay with me. I was willing to take what I could get because I had already been dealing with power politics for a long while, and any time you can get something for free in politics, you take it.
Suddenly, I felt unbounded. Unlike all of the time I had spent as an environmentalist in Wyoming, I now had a constituency that was not defined by previously formed political views. The initial settings had not yet been applied, so I could help apply them. I had already developed a sufficiently credible voice so that people would pay attention to what I wanted to say. Self-publishing opened me up as a writer, and what I was writing about was the developing economics, politics, and law of cyberspace. Oddly enough, no one else seemed to be.
Not that there weren’t sometimes serious repercussions to the views I was now expressing on the Internet on a fairly regular basis. Inspired by an astonishing quote from Thomas Jefferson as well as my own experience with the Grateful Dead’s willingness to give away our music to people who had taped our concerts, I published an essay in Wired magazine in 1994 that was variously called “The Economy of Ideas,” “Wine Without Bottles,” and “Everything You Know About Intellectual Property Is Wrong.”
I realized that with the Internet, it would be possible for anybody to make infinite copies of any work that could be created by the human mind and then distribute them at zero cost throughout the entire portion of humanity that was interested. This was going to change everything.
Although I thought that most of these ideas were so obvious as to be noncontroversial, I soon learned how wrong I was. In fact, they were anathema to companies like Microsoft, who made their living by bottling thought. As soon as “The Economy of Ideas” appeared in Wired, Bill Gates, who had been one of most substantial supporters of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, withdrew both his own and his company’s support. Moreover, he let it be known that any major contribution to EFF from a Microsoft employee could be grounds for dismissal. This despite the fact that I had not written the essay ex cathedra as the EFF, but as a statement of my own opinion.
And so it was that the other great work of my life began: spending countless hours and air miles tramping around the planet trying to convince the powers-that-have-been of the complete futility of their methods for making money from thought. Despite the many travails I encountered along the way, I would rank cofounding the Electronic Frontier Foundation as one of the major achievements of my life. After having served as its vice-chairman for twenty-seven years, my formal position with the organization is now listed as “Rocking Chair.”
THIRTY-THREE
TIMOTHY LEARY REDUX
As I fell deeper down the rabbit hole of digital technology, I gravitated toward virtual reality, which in many ways was pretty much what I had been into all along. In 1987, I saw a picture of the data glove on the cover of Scientific American and a bell went off. I knew immediately that something was going on and that maybe it was time to revisit my notion of how one interacted with these rough beasts called computers. If one could actually reach into the data sphere and grab hold of it with a hand, that was completely different from doing so on a keyboard.
In any event, I became enchanted with people who were involved in this new form of technology, and I met a fellow named Erik Gullikson, who was working on a virtual reality project at Autodesk. He thought it might be a good idea to recruit Timothy Leary to include virtual reality as part of his latest medicine show.
By then, Tim had been in prison and in exile in Algeria and had then spent more time in prison only to emerge and somehow become the toast of the town in Los Angeles. He was living in a house in Beverly Hills with Barbara, his fifth wife, going out to clubs on the Sunset Strip about every night, delivering three or four lectures a week at colleges and universities for ten or twelve thousand dollars a pop, and playing small parts in movies and television shows.
Although I had not seen Tim since I had spent time with him and the Grateful Dead at Millbrook in 1967, I went down to Los Angeles to interview him for the book I was still purportedly writing. At this point, I had been off mind-altering substances for a long time. The first person I met in the house was Barbara, who said that before I could even talk to Tim I had to eat some of these brownies. Which of course I did.
The three of us then went out on this wild cruise through the hills where we got totally lost. Barbara was screeching at us like a harpy, and Tim and I were laughing like crazy and bucking her authority. It was like he had found an ally in me. The two of us were catching up on old times and new times. It was a truly wonderful night as well as the birth of a brand-new deal between us.
The way I understood the deal was that periodically, we would have these intense distilled encapsulated familial Irish moments. Blood was not even thick enough to describe the nature of our new relationship, because we were both outlaws in the primordial sense of the term. As Bob Dylan had once famously said, to live outside the law you had to be honest on a certain level. You can’t be a proper outlaw without some kind of touchstone of deep morality, and Tim and I understood that about each other. Just like him, I also loved state change. How about we try this and see what happens? Life endangering? Too bad.
This was truly a Nietzschean condition that was beyond good and evil. It was recognizing that you had a message to share that was far beyond this binary framework, and if they judged you, then they judged you. You had to absorb that, but it had little to do with your real purpose in life.
If I looked at Tim’s purpose in life and mine, it was all about trying to demonstrate to humanity that reality was an opinion and not a fact. And that authority was not God-given but earned and also transitory. Once we began spending time together again, Tim introduced me to people as the most American person he knew. It was intended to be both a compliment and an insult. “Here’s Barlow. He’s an American.”
Although I had always been proud of my ability to not judge people, Timmy pressed harder on that than anybody I had ever known. He wanted to force you into this point of choice where if you were going to judge him, you had both ample opportunity and plenty of evidence. He gave us all so much rope to hang him with that in the final analysis, not many people who really knew him were actually willing to use it. Those who didn’t know him judged him harshly, and they had every reason to do so because of how much damage he had done by espousing the use of LSD as the sole solution to all of the world’s many problems.
Tim was all about real redemption, and while it is easy to redeem the holy, it is far more important to redeem the base and the depraved. It’s easy to love your friends, but what Christ asked us to do was love our enemies. It’s easy to forgive the minor transgressions but not the real sins, and that’s where it all really comes down.
Tim’s morality, such as it existed at all, was incredibly flexible. If you looked at yourself as a freewheeling instrument of the God-knows-what—which I think he did and I certainly did as well—you never knew when you were actually being summoned to do something important as an agent of instruction and when you were just acting out.
Tim knew he was catalytic and that real catalytic behavior has no moral reference. You just smelled the air and made your decision on the basis of things that did not have rules. Throughout his life, Tim went back and forth between being a good Irish boy and the devil’s top hand.
Tim viewed love as both a necessity and a weakness. He was really the most complex, divided human being I had ever met. The Catholic Church was always the deal for Tim. It was the heart of the matter, and he spent most of his life being the anti-Christ while at the same time wanti
ng to be the Christ.
Tim also worshipped at the altar of all that was female. When I reconnected with him in Los Angeles, he and Barbara had been married for about twelve years. I always saw her as something the devil wore when he was in a particularly sporting mood. She was dire and difficult but also a wonderful human being in an extremely weird way. She was the great love of his life. Tim said that to me numerous times.
I began spending a good deal of time with them, and then Tim basically gave me permission to be her lover. He couldn’t be for her what she needed sexually, so it made more sense for him to anoint someone to do that for him. We had a wild relationship.
At one point, Tim and I went off on a speaking tour together in Europe. It was right after his daughter, Susan, had committed suicide by hanging herself from the bars of her jail cell after she had twice been found mentally unfit to stand trial for having shot her boyfriend in the head while he was sleeping. In many ways, Tim was still possessed by this and very much of an emotional mess.
I was much more of a moralist than Tim, and thought the best way to judge a person was by their children. Thus, I felt that the man who in some weird way was now my master had failed the ultimate test. While we were in Europe, I was out on the road acting as his foil with this terrible sense of “You are the ultimate loser, pal.” I tried to get him to talk to me about it, but he could never explain why his daughter had died this way. He spoke about her suicide with the terrible abstraction of pain while alternately blaming himself. He did not have a position about it; actually, he had so many that they added up to not being one. He was really deeply troubled by her death and never did manage to work it out.
Part of Tim’s thing about boredom was that in boredom lies responsibility. In that still moment when nothing else is going on, you actually have to confront yourself. And that was the last thing he ever wanted to do. The bargain Tim had made with himself was that he was denied a view of his own soul until the very last moments of his life.
But he really was a messenger. Only someone so demonic and so equivocal about all the normal tendencies of morality and faith and decency could have been the proper vessel for the spiritual message that Timothy Leary brought to the world. He was possessed. He was a demon. A very special demon. In order to spread the message, one of the fallen had to rise up. And that was Timothy Leary.
I honestly believe Timothy Leary was the handmaiden of God in the strangest possible way. I’d always felt that one of the people in Christianity who got the short shrift was Judas. Without Judas, what would there have been? No crucifixion, no resurrection, and no redemption. You had to have Judas. Somebody had to be the Judas, and that was absolutely who Tim was. I knew he would never betray me, because in many ways, I was as bad as he was.
THIRTY-FOUR
WHO’S NeXT
I met Steve Jobs for the first time because I wanted to go to the introduction of the NeXT computer at Davies Symphony Hall in San Francisco on October 12, 1988. I contacted some people I knew at NeXT and then I got a letter from Steve asking if I was the same John Barlow who had written songs for the Grateful Dead. I told him I was and he said, “And you want to write about the NeXT?” After I told him I did, Steve said he would get me a press pass.
At that point, Steve was scared shitless and for good reason. Apple had tossed him out on his ear, and with NeXT he was completely on his own. In many ways, he was actually totally on his ass but also being realistic. When I looked at that machine, I turned to him and said, “Jeez, this is the greatest technological tool ever devised. This completely blows all the competition out of the water. You’re going to do so well.” And he said, “In my experience, more companies have died of indigestion than starvation.” By indigestion he meant having more demand than he could fulfill, which of course was not a problem he had or was ever going to have with the NeXT.
In the end, Steve managed to sell only forty-two thousand of those things. Primarily, this was because they were too far ahead of their time and much too expensive. The company was also too slow in coming up with alternatives to the things that were wrong with it. Steve was convinced—and I don’t know where he got this idea—that the answer to storage in the future would be these big 650-megabyte read-write optical disks. You could plug them in and out and that was your world. It was the operating system and also held all of your documents. The company went on trying to get people to use those optical disks as the main means of storage a lot longer than they should have.
But the machines were incredibly practical and so much faster than anything else at the time. They also had a whole bunch of features that have not been seen in computers since. The NeXT had something called display postscript, which meant that it wrote postscript to the screen and to the printer so that whatever was on the screen was exactly what you would have on the printer. It was all written in Objective-C, which was not a popular computer language then, but now all the apps in iPhones are written in it; the iPhone is actually a NeXT, as is the MacBook.
What Steve had brought with him from Apple to NeXT was the operating system. If you go into the iPhone now and poke around, you’ll find a whole bunch of files that have the extension nib, which actually stands for NeXT Interface Builder. Back then, these files were an incredibly powerful leap forward.
I just loved that machine. Though, like Steve, it had some really astonishing flaws. Unlike Steve, the NeXT’s flaws were corrected. They were corrected pretty quickly but not until after they had already put a mark against it.
In 1991, I became the associate editor of NeXTWORLD, a magazine devoted exclusively to the NeXT computer. NeXTWORLD was not a direct extension of NeXT itself, but if I wrote something that Steve didn’t like, a seven A.M. phone call from him was something that could happen at least once a week. The magazine itself didn’t have a huge amount of subscribers but you talk about fanboys? I was definitely one of them.
Even then, Steve himself was kind of impossible to characterize. You would have this immediate strong desire to both hug him and slug him. You didn’t know which was stronger, but they were both pretty powerful. Steve was not like Dick Cheney or Bill Gates. They both had blazingly fast central processors, whereas Steve was also charismatic to the tits. Steve made you care about what he thought of you, and even though you could pretend that you didn’t, you were kidding yourself. It was a quality Garcia had as well, but the thing with him was that he didn’t want you to care about him like that. He really did not, but nevertheless you did.
On May 22, 1993, Steve asked me if I would host his celebrity roast at the NeXT convention at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. Roasts are usually meted out to people who are doing well, but the somewhat hollow quality of this roast might actually have been the nadir of Steve’s career. The NeXT was already failing as a hardware play, which was really sad because it was far and away the greatest computer ever made. The elegance of design was like UNIX by Armani.
The NeXT had been introduced at a time when Steve firmly believed he was going to make it a success. But then there was this era of darkness when Steve decided that what he really had was a software company, and he hated that. One of Steve’s main principles was that he wanted to integrate both software and hardware. Only by doing that could he control the entire user experience, which made really good sense.
My roast of him that night consisted mainly of gallows humor about the state of the company. I was aware of the pall hanging over the event, and I was trying to make light of it in a dark way. What I had completely forgotten about was that Steve had just married Laurene Powell, and so I now had a fierce contender for his interests. On the conference floor in the Moscone Center the next day, she came at me with both spike heels right down my throat and lathered me up and down. Like, “How dare you say that stuff? We thought you were a loyal partisan.” I said, “I am a loyal partisan, but if NeXT is still manufacturing hardware next year at this time, I will eat the column
I wrote in which I claimed that it wouldn’t.”
She said, “Steve is not going to be happy to hear you said that.” I said, “I don’t care whether he’s happy or not.” The fact was that I did care. I couldn’t not care about what Steve thought. But Laurene in full dudgeon was nobody to mess with.
To his credit, Steve himself never came at me about it, because he wanted to have a good relationship with me. And he already knew the hardware wasn’t going to work because the model was too expensive. He also really cared about the Dead. In our conversation before the roast, I realized what a fanboy Steve was, because he was talking about dropping acid and how important that and the music of the Grateful Dead had been for him.
One aspect of Steve’s genius was his ability to surround himself with people like Bud Tribble, whom those at Apple used to call “the world’s smartest invertebrate.” Steve would fulminate and carry on and punch the wall and tell people what idiots they were and then flounce out of the room. And then Bud, who had been sitting there quietly all the while, would say, “Here’s what he meant.” He would pick up the pieces, like Jony Ive has done at Apple for the past twenty-five years.
At one point, the president of Volkswagen got in touch with me. He wanted me to introduce him to Steve because he had something important to talk to him about. I said, “What is it?” And he said, “Does that matter?” And I said, “Yes, it actually does because as important as this may seem to you, it may not be important to him.”
I had to go through a whole rigmarole getting the two of them together. By then, Steve was back at Apple. What the guy wanted to do was produce an iCar, but this was in 2004, just as Steve was beginning to create the iPhone. Steve said, “You know, I love this idea. I really do. But I’ve got this other thing I’m doing, and I’m not going to do anything else until I’ve gotten it right.” The Volkswagen guy was like, “But I’m going to be spending all the money on this.” And Steve’s thing was, “No, you don’t get it. I’m changing the world.” It probably set back the development of the self-driving car for a while.
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