The original cybercowboy, Wyoming-bred Barlow fights for digital freedom in hyperspace as head of the Electronic Frontiers Foundation, a group dedicated to keeping electronic networks free of corporate control. An unrepentant 'hippie mystic' who hates computers but loves connectedness, he reflects on the shape of the digital world to come for Mondo 2000 and a host of other jacked-in jounals, and writes songs for the Grateful Dead in his spare time.

If there are parallels between the American West's wide open spaces and the newest frontier--cyberspace--John Perry Barlow is the one to tell you about them. This 48-year-old Wyoming-bred former rancher is a cyberactivist and writer who, with his Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), is working, in Barlow's words, 'to civilize cyberspace--by keeping civilization out of cyberspace.'

That cheerful anarchism, and that jaunty way with a paradox, are essential Barlow, who's a bit of a paradox himself. '[I'm] probably the only former Republican county chairman in America willing to call himself a hippie mystic,' he's written; and between penning articles on virtual reality, computer security, and the global impact of 'connected digital devices'--the Net--for magazines like Wired and Mondo 2000, he cowrites songs with those veteran cosmic cowboys, the Grateful Dead.

Barlow's fascination with cyberspace, and with maintaining individual freedom there in the face of the increasing threat of corporate control symbolized by the controlled-access 'information superhighway,' has nothing to do with nerdy technophilia. 'I hate computers,' he says. 'Telepathy would be better.' Clearly, what draws Barlow to cyberspace is its ability to connect humans--'cyberspace may be closer to community than suburbia,' he claims--and to put them into a wholly new realm.