GoKawiilFor the Conference on HyperNetworking, Oita, Japan
by John Perry Barlow
Like very few Americans of my generation, I come from the physical world.
I spent most of my working life running a large cattle ranch, first as a cowboy and then as a cowman, earning a living from things I could touch and smell.
This career involved the continual and palpable presence of such non-abstractions as the hindquarters of a hundred cows plodding through sagebrush before me or the sound of my ball-peen hammer banging on cold and greasy metal. I found myself constantly hard up against the physical world, whether digging holes in rock-packed glacial rubble or stringing barbed wire as far as the eye could see.
I conducted this enterprise...if any such unprofitable endeavor could be called an enterprise...in the last part of America still holding out against the advancing Information Age. This is where our great and bogus cultural myth of independent, kick-ass-and-take names individualism, having finally ran up against the finite limits of physical resources, space, and the resilience of nature, is down to.
It's Aristotle's last stand. occidental arrogance having finally become confused in its trajectory of dominion. Plato is about to have his day. Or even better, Heraclitus. Better still, Nagarjuna.
I come from that Great Blank Slate, the American West, now migrating across video displays into eastern Europe and Japan, universally known as Marlboro Country.
(Indeed, I was for several years in the horse business with the actual Marlboro Man, a neighbor of mine, who would have been appalled at the international familiarity of his face. In the service of his sanity, he stayed home.)
When I was a kid growing up in Wyoming, there seemed nothing artificial, or even particularly romantic, about this place. Soon its tarted-up advertising after-image will be all that remains of it.
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