A decade before the Yahoo case, two men in different parts of America began to use the Internet for the first time. One was Julian Dibbell, a New Yorker and pop music writer who covered technology issues for the Village Voice. The other was John Perry Barlow of Wyoming, a libertarian, lyricist, and cattle rancher who looked the years he had spent traveling with the Grateful Dead. Dibbell and Barlow were very different people. Dibbell, born in the 1960s, was a member of what people in the ’90s called Generation X. Barlow was writing rock-and-roll songs when Dibbell was born, and he never lost the passion or political purpose of the 1960s. But the two had this in common: neither were native computer geeks, and both were lucid, even lyrical writers who wanted to communicate the Internet experience to regular people. In popular magazines like Wired and the Village Voice, they did just this. Dibbell and Barlow became the great explorers of the cyberspace age. Like Henry Stanley, the Welsh-American journalist who famously recounted his expeditions in Africa, Dibbell and Barlow had discovered an exotic place and wanted to tell others about it. As with any explorers, the tales they brought back reflected their own experience and assumptions more than objective reality. Nonetheless, these stories articulated a powerful vision: a new frontier, where people lived in peace, under their own rules, liberated from the constraints of an oppressive society and free from government meddling. Through the writings and actions of Dibbell, Barlow, and others, this chapter and the next depict the era when it was widely believed that cyberspace might challenge the authority of nation-states and move the world to a new, post-territorial system. Today, notions of a selfgoverning cyberspace are largely discredited. But the historical significance of these ideas cannot be ignored. They had an enormous impact on Internet writers and thinkers, firms, and even the U.S. Supreme Court—an influence that is still with us today. To understand the reality and forgotten virtues of territorial government, we must first understand the possibilities and attractions of a place once called cyberspace.
