I had always liked people taking shots at me, so I went. I was sitting in the bar of the Hotel Martinez surrounded by some of the most loathsome human beings imaginable, the European music industry. I was saving a seat for Gil, and I had to keep fending off people who wanted to take it by saying, “Sorry. I’m saving that for the minister of culture of Brazil.”
I looked around for what I imagined the minister of culture of Brazil would look like, expecting some gray fellow with a couple of minders. But then I saw a guy with three-inch dreads wearing a dashiki. I immediately knew this was the most interesting guy in the room, and he was somebody I really wanted to talk to.
However, when he made a beeline for my reserved seat, I said, “I’m sorry. I’m saving that seat for the minister of culture of Brazil.” And he said, “I am him.”
We started talking, and I was amazed by Gil on every level. The two of us hit it off right from the start. We talked and talked, and he was quite concerned about the nature of the future of the Internet in his country; it was then still in its infancy in Brazil. Eventually, we cooked up a plot that would allow us to seize the opportunity to take a major country’s policy on intellectual property and give it a hard turn in the direction of sense. Our original goal was to make Brazilian music available online so it could be remixed and shared with others.
Google had just come up with a social networking system that was a lot like what Facebook eventually became, and it might well have been. It was called Orkut, which was the first name of the guy who had created it for them. They wanted to keep the network from growing too fast right off the bat, so they only gave out a hundred free invitation rights each to a bunch of digital notables. I happened to be one of them.
By then, I had already claimed that Brazil was about to become an important part of the Internet because it was the most networked nation I had ever seen in terms of everybody’s connection to everybody else. The entire country was one vast horizontal matrix of friends and relatives and enemies. Brazil was also willing to overturn the copyright restrictions that were being imposed on the Internet. It was absolutely the test tube I had been looking for. So I took all one hundred of my invitations and gave them to Brazilians.
Not long after our meeting in Cannes, I made my first trip to Brazil to join Gil and Jack Lang, who had been the minister of culture in France, on a triumphal cultural tour. The tour coincided with carnival, and the three of us went around Brazil together to various carnival events in Rio, São Paulo, and Recife. Brazil itself was so completely like America in many ways that it was weird. It was also totally unlike America in that its people were completely self-effacing. There was a little bit of an apology in every sentence that everyone said.
People were puzzled by my presence on the tour. At one point, somebody said to Gil, “We understand you and Mr. Lang, but Barlow is not a minister of culture. In fact his country doesn’t even have one.” And Gil said, “Yes they do. It’s Mickey Mouse. And the reason we have a minister of culture is to keep theirs from taking ours over.”
Most of the people I met in Brazil had not yet had the opportunity to use digital technology. The Brazilian government had very stupidly thought they were going to develop their own indigenous computer industry and had put tariffs on everything digital coming into the country. They were way behind America, but Gil and I managed to change that.
After that first trip, I returned to Brazil repeatedly. I helped put on a conference there with Gil and Larry Lessig, whom I had met while spending a year as a founding fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard in 1999. Two years later, Larry had helped found Creative Commons, a nonprofit organization dedicated to distributing free licenses to intellectual property based on existing copyrights. Larry’s focus at the conference was to explain how people could start embedding Creative Commons licenses into Brazilian law.
I also worked with Gil and some of his colleagues in setting up centro culturales in favelas around Brazil. These were spaces where young people could gather and learn how to create music and art with the computers we had given them. We also showed them how to do open-source code, which helped produce a Brazilian hacker culture. Soon they were making their own conto culturales.
Previously, there had always been grown-ups in charge who would not allow the kids to touch the machines except under supervision, so they could learn only how to become office slaves by using Excel or Word. We made it so anyone could come and learn how to work on their graffiti licks. There are now thousands of these conto culturales all over Brazil without any support from the government.
Within two or three months, the Orkut social network became 65 to 70 percent Brazilian, which really limited it. Although this proved my point beautifully, it certainly didn’t serve Google’s purposes very well. Despite the fact that Google shut it down worldwide in 2014, Orkut is still maintained in Brazil because it has remained so popular there.
As is generally the case when big changes take place, there was a reaction. Gil and I got a lot done, but much of it was undone by both internal and external forces. Still, there is more copyright freedom in Brazil now than in America, as well as far more awareness of Creative Commons.
FORTY-FIVE
THE PURE WATER PROJECT
In 2007, I had back surgery to repair a spondylolisthesis that had caused my spine to become unmoored from my sacrum and created endless pain. The condition had been caused by some bad surgery I’d had at Stanford some years before that had reduced my life to five-minute intervals. If I could just make it through this five minutes, then I thought that I could probably make it through the next five.
Based on the butchery that had already been performed on me, I was wary about having more back surgery. It took me a long time to conclude that it was just going to have to be repaired. When I met with my surgeon, Dr. Sig Berven, he looked at my back and said, “This is a very severe situation. Repairing it would mean a non-zero chance of fatality.” And I said, “There is a non-zero chance of fatality when I jaywalk.” He said, “Oh, it’s a much higher number than that.”
I asked him what would happen if I didn’t get the surgery. He looked at me clear and hard and said, “Eventually, your spine will fall through your asshole.” I said, “Then let’s schedule surgery.”
The surgery was long and scary, but it worked. Shortly afterward, I sent out a Barlow Spam with pictures of the upright and glowing new me, and among the responses I got was one from Alan Alda, who said, “For years, I have been watching you curl in your pain like a drying fruit. Now you seem full of juice. That must be intimidating.”
In fact, he had nailed it. It was amazingly intimidating. Suddenly, I had a future that was longer than five minutes. In fact, I probably had enough time left for yet another reincarnation. But to what end? I knew I had secured my legacy as an early guardian of the Internet, but now I wanted to do something completely different. I had no idea what that would be.
I kept thinking about what Mardy Murie had said to me one day. Mardy was regarded as the “grandmother of the conservation movement” and had lived to the age of a hundred and one. She had told me, “Environmentalists can be a pain in the ass. But they make great ancestors.” And so I decided that I wanted to be a great ancestor as well.
But what did my descendants really need? After thinking about it for a while, I identified three problems to attack. One of them was that most of the drinking water in the world was dangerous to the children who drank it. Moreover, their mothers were often required to carry it long distances from the source. The number of woman hours spent carrying water in Africa every day was beyond calculation.
I also did not believe that climate change was a myth. I didn’t necessarily believe in global warming, but I did believe in global weird-ing because, as a consequence of human activity, the weather was getting more and more violent and unpredictable. Something needed to be done about it that wou
ld not load additional CO2 into the atmosphere.
A whip-smart chemist and entrepreneur named Matt Atwood who I had camped with at Burning Man earlier that year took me down to the NASA Ames Research Center at Moffett Field, California, where a charismatic scientist named Jonathan Trent gave us a presentation on something called the OMEGA project, an acronym for Offshore Membrane Enclosures for Growing Algae. After looking at a set of PowerPoint slides, Matt and I could not believe how great this project was. Of course the devil was in the details but we were both convinced we had just seen the future. Now we had to go build it.
The OMEGA project was essentially a system to put raw sewage into large plastic bags floating offshore so algae could clean the water. The resulting biomass could then be converted into a carbon-negative fuel by some means yet to be devised.
We spent about four months negotiating a license for the OMEGA technology, which got resolved only when we realized the lawyers who were negotiating with us didn’t actually have a goal: They got paid whether we reached a deal or not. Which was one reason NASA generates thousands of patents every year but only ever licenses a dozen or so.
When we finally succeeded in getting the license, we realized the system didn’t work as designed. But Matt discovered that another company called GreenFuel Technologies had already spent about $70 million on related research and development. They had since gone belly-up but still held a key patent on floating bioreactors that gave us the ability to move forward with the project.
We were able to get Edgar Bronfman, Jr.—with whom I used to have public debates over copyrights in the music industry, because he took all that shit personally—to give us enough money to buy GreenFuel’s intellectual property. We acquired all their research and patents for $350,000. Not bad when you consider they had put $70 million into it.
Over the course of the next six years, Matt, Andrew Septimus, our young chief financial officer who had a lot of experience in raising capital, and I assembled a magical crew of geniuses who helped us design and build an industrial-scale model of the first bio transformer that could create pure water, fuel, pure carbon, pure nitrogen, and pure phosphorous from sewage.
The total cost was around $19 million; we got the money from the IHI Corporation, the oldest heavy industry company in Japan, which had been started by samurai upon the arrival of Commodore Perry in Tokyo Bay in 1853. Even though IHI had six or seven different bio-fuel start-ups they were looking at in America, they got more and more interested in what we wanted to do.
From its samurai beginnings, IHI had developed a Bushido-based culture that was not exactly a perfect fit for wild lads like us. Matt and I walked into our first meeting with IHI in New York wearing jeans. Sitting across the table from us were about eight absolutely immaculate Japanese salarymen in suits. Matt and I suddenly realized we had better step it up a notch if we really wanted to be in business with them, and we then spent the next nine months undergoing the most penetrating due diligence process since the Spanish Inquisition.
We called our company Algae Systems, a name I was always opposed to because at the time everyone and their idiot nephew had an algae project. What was special about our project was the attempt to take raw sewage and convert it into fresh water, fuel, and soil stabilizer.
We set up a working industrial plant in Daphne, Alabama, that proved itself by creating pure water as well as a light crude oil that was indistinguishable from the stuff that comes out of the ground. As we proceeded, we solved a lot of hard problems through simple resourcefulness, such as sterilizing sewage at low cost without making it uninhabitable for the algae we were going to inject into it. We also created what I believe remains the world’s largest hydrothermal liquefaction converter, which can take biomass such as algae or waste water and produce light, sweet crude oil from it in sixty seconds. Within the earth, the same process takes sixty million years.
Our system began processing twenty thousand gallons of sewage and producing from it clean water, carbon-negative energy, and biochar that was enriched with nitrogen and phosphorous, thereby making it more attractive to farmers who were reluctant to use simple biochar to renew soil.
Everything was working according to plan, but then our champion at IHI was suddenly forced to relocate back to Japan and the new overseers demanded instant profits, which had never been the plan. We spent the better part of the year going back and forth with IHI and then desperately started looking elsewhere for funding to enable us to continue the project, but people laughed out loud at us because up to that point investments in biofuel had been uniformly unsuccessful. All the investors we approached had no real stomach for doing anything that required starting and running a business as opposed to simply selling an idea for a lot of money.
In 2015, IHI informed us they were not going to continue funding the company, and we were forced to shut down the plant and fire the entire staff. In return for cleaning up the site in Alabama, we were, however, able to persude IHI to let us keep our rights to the project.
To this point in time, there have been more days than I can count when I thought the project was dead. No matter how hard we tried, Matt and I could not find the money to turn it around, which was not all that surprising because, for one thing, our company name had the word algae in it. No way in hell would I ever invest in something with that name. And while what we were doing also sounded much too good to be true, it wasn’t.
I have worked tirelessly on this project, and one of things that makes me sad is I think we could have gotten the money by now if I hadn’t gotten sick. I still really hope it happens, because while I don’t much care about making a fortune, I do think it is important to leave the world with technology that could improve water, sanitation, the delivery of carbon-negative fuel, and soil stabilization.
I always like to have a mission in life and feel like I am doing something that will allow some significant percentage of my descendants to feel they are leading better lives because of the life I led. Whether or not I would be remembered as the one who had done it was irrelevant. Every year, millions of children still die from drinking toxic water, and I was hoping to use my last go-round to create a system that would produce a lot more water that isn’t fatal to drink. Whether this will ever happen, I have no idea. But I am not about to stop trying.
FORTY-SIX
THE FREEDOM OF THE PRESS FOUNDATION
After WikiLeaks released a trove of U.S. embassy cables to the press in 2010, Joe Lieberman, who was then the chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee, imposed a weird and completely unjustified financial embargo on the organization by pressuring Amazon, PayPal, and all the major credit card companies to drop WikiLeaks from their sites so they could no longer get donations through these convenient channels. I went to the board of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and said, “Hey, we’re a nonprofit. Let’s create a path through us to help out Julian Assange, because he’s doing the stuff that we’ve always wanted to do.”
At that point, EFF was twenty-five years old. More than half the employees were lawyers, and they all felt there was a significant chance that we’d be hauled into court for aiding and abetting Julian Assange. The chief counsel’s response to me was, “I’d much rather be defending you than having somebody defend me.”
She then said, “Why don’t you do it personally?” I said, “What do you mean?” And she said, “You’re fearless. You take the hit and we’ll defend you. We’ll be with you all the way.” I said, “I think people may have a lot of respect for me, but if I’m going to set up a merchant banking account and ask people to start plunking hundreds of thousands of dollars into it on my word that it’s going through to WikiLeaks—that seems like a bit of a long shot.”
I rolled the idea around in my head for a while. Then I thought, if I had some other people join me who were equally gutsy, then it would probably become a lot easier. The first person I calle
d was Daniel Ellsberg. Dan loved the idea and was delighted to join me in cofounding a new foundation that would help get money to WikiLeaks. We then added Trevor Timm, Rainey Reitman, Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras, Xeni Jardin, and John Cusack to our board of directors.
Originally, we intended the Freedom of the Press Foundation to be a first-of-its-kind crowd funding mechanism. We copied an astonishingly clever donation method so no one could tell how much money was actually going to WikiLeaks. The person giving the money knew, but it would be extremely hard to trace it because there were three other news organizations who were also beneficiaries.
Not long after we had done this, I was in London with my girlfriend, and we both spent the better part of an afternoon and early evening with Julian Assange in the Frontline Club. It’s the kind of place where tweedy intellectuals with leather elbow patches and meerschaum pipes once would have congregated. Although I had never met Julian before, he had apparently known about me since he had been in knee pants, and gave me what I would call a fair modicum of respect. At the time, he was also pitching me to bring in the EFF to help support WikiLeaks by giving him a lot of money (which I, of course, was already inclined to do), and this was definitely another factor in the way he treated me.
Nonetheless, throughout the course of our conversation, Julian kept his gaze fixed directly on my girlfriend. He kept looking at her in the way someone does when he means to form a relationship of some sort. I didn’t really mind and, to her great credit, my girlfriend was totally amused by this. Fortunately for both Julian and myself, he was one of those people who fell into a category where I never really asked myself how much I actually respected him personally.
The Freedom of the Press Foundation then began funneling money to WikiLeaks on a fairly regular basis. This went on for months, and my best guess would be that we transferred around $100,000 to him in the first year.
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