They helped Steve Jackson Games hand the Feds a stinging defeat in court. Their "Open Platform" proposal is the heart of Gore's Infobahn policy. They lead the coalition fighting the Clipper Chip. In short, the Electronic Frontier Foundation is the preeminent defender of our civil rights in cyberspace. But just who are these people?
The EFF does something that Mitch Kapor has wanted to do for three decades - "find a way of preserving the ideology of the 1960s."
Hardly anyone is eating the shrimp.
A silver bucket of chipped ice sits in the middle of the table, engorged with the fattest, juiciest shrimp you could ever want, and they're being ignored. So is the beef satay. The dozen people standing around the table don't appear to notice this – they're not even drinking the wine, so deep are they in celebratory conversation.
Did you hear about Barlow and Gore?
Did you see Mitch on C-SPAN?
More people wander into the back room of Bistro Roti, reserved for tonight's quarterly dinner for the Electronic Frontier Foundation's board of directors and friends. The Bistro is a cozily upscale place overlooking the bay in San Francisco's skyscrapered financial district. It has a wood- burning stove and valet parking, though at the moment, as the sun goes to bed without a fight, the valet looks like he's about to thrombose because whoever left the white Jaguar in the front ... also left the car alarm on.
The poor man is racing around, fitting his valet's key in each door, trying to get in and disarm the beast. It's getting louder with each pulse, the lights are flashing, and a crowd is gathering on the sidewalk. People are sticking fingers in their ears. At the last possible moment, the valet finds the one door that will accept his key (the passenger door?), slides in, punches the right code, and the alarm quiets.
You half expect to hear an icy female voice – that dead-flat computer voice overused in techno-thrillers like The Andromeda Strain, back when technology was bad and out of control – you expect that voice to whisper out of the Jaguar's grille and reassure all:
The alarm has been aborted. All systems are now normal.
It's a funny counterpoint to what's going on at the private party within, where technology feels under control and at your service.
Someone near the shrimp says: Mitch was mentioned by the vice president!
He really was, but if you know anything about the EFF, you certainly know by now that Al Gore credited Mitch Kapor, EFF's chairman and co-founder, with helping draft the blueprint for the National Information Infrastructure. It was a fine moment for Kapor and a plum for the Washington, DC-based nonprofit EFF. The four-year-old organization has been trying to become the political force of cyberspace. Some people think it's succeeding. If you listened to the vice president's first major address on overhauling the nation's telecommunications policy, way back in December 1993, or read the administration's white paper, you might agree: An EFF concept was the keystone of the whole thing.
The Open Platform
It's barely a metaphor, and neither as sexy sounding as the electronic frontier nor as overused as the national information superhighway, but there it is, the Open Platform – a model for how telephone companies, cable companies, newspapers, TV stations, and your mom will all interconnect in one seamless web of point-to-point, peer-to-peer harmony. With equal access for all.
And it's really just the beginning. Plans are being laid, being pitched among the people here waiting for supper. They want to put the science back into political science. The idea is to go further than the Open Platform, further than the National Information Infrastructure.
The idea is to reclaim Washington.
It all makes sense when you consider that four of the ten board members are hackers, software people used to methodical problem solving. Start with one simple statement, add it to another until, the next thing you know, you have millions of lines of code that run the whole damn space shuttle. How hard could it be to hack government?
That bottom-up approach has led some of the people in this very room to talk about building a Net political party, founded on the premise that centralized authority is inefficient and archaic. Centralized government, they say, will be made obsolete by the push-button, interactive democracy that an Open Platform could create. "The fundamental thing (the Net does) is to overcome the advantages of economies of scale ... so the big guys don't rule," says Esther Dyson, a board member, who says organized political parties won't be needed if open networks "enable people to organize ad hoc, rather than get stuck in some rigid group."
Kapor himself has been talking a lot lately about a "floating academy," an EFF evangelistic entity on the Net, spreading the word, propagating the vision of what the New World could be. The Net, the very network itself, you see, is merely a means to an end. The end is to reverse-engineer government, to hack Politics down to its component parts and fix it.
The Beginnings
Who are these guys?
In some ways, they are the Merry Pranksters, those apostles of LSD, who tripped through the 1960s in a psychedelic bus named Furthur, led by novelist Ken Kesey and chronicled by Tom Wolfe in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. Older and wiser now, they're on the road again, without the bus and the acid, but dispensing many similar-sounding bromides: Turn on, jack in, get connected. Feed your head with the roar of bits pulsing across the cosmos, and learn something about who you are.
Among them are former acid-heads turned millionaires: ideologues who came of age during the 1960s, then proved themselves in the marketplace, Ross Perot-like. And now, grown up, they have retired from the business world to make federal policy, to change the things they were powerless to change when they were love-bead-festooned kids.
They're not interested in all federal policy – just information policy. Information policy is as important to the future as, well, Free Speech or the Freedom of Assembly or the Right to Privacy, all constitutional privileges that will either get trampled in the stampede to an Information Age (if some people have their way) or be reclaimed and strengthened (if others have their way). Enlightened information policy will protect our ability to exchange new ideas, to evolve and improve the human condition.
There are naysayers (not in this room, of course, but they're out there) who wave their hands dismissively and say this is all a big fat joke. The EFF has already abandoned its original mission – looking out for the Little Guy in Cyberspace, they say. And where once the foundation warned against police agencies behaving like security guards for telephone companies, now too much of its funding comes from the local and long- distance telcos (in fact, no more than 10 percent of the EFF's US$1.5 million annual budget comes from those companies). The EFF is ideologically peripatetic, a hobby for Kapor; it will surely disappear when Kapor loses interest, they say. (Kapor, EFF's first major contributor, now ponies up only 15 percent of its budget. That's still an expensive hobby.)
While admitting that this public policy phase of his life has a "huge novelty factor, all this new stuff, all these new skills to master," Kapor denies that his concern is short-term – not in his involvement with the foundation, not with the foundation's involvement in national affairs. The EFF is here for the long term because there is much meaningful work to be done. The organization does something he's wanted to do for three decades, he says – "find a way of preserving the ideology of the 1960s."
Introductions
But first, dinner. Everyone takes their seats.
Kapor, a pleasant-looking man with an almost ancient-Mayan mien, stands at the front of the private room and beams like a proud owner.
The board members and guests settle into three long tables that form a large U. Waiters and waitresses quietly remove the uneaten shrimp and satay and whisper to each diner: Chicken, steak, or fish? Hot from the wood stove.
Now, Kapor makes a few welcoming remarks and asks everyone to introduce themselves and tell why they're here. "Starting with – you," he says, pointing to a callused-looking, bleary-eyed man imperiously wearing a blazer, a knotted silk scarf, and a name tag that says "Hi, I'm ... barlow@eff.org." This is John Perry Barlow, the Great Metaphorician, the very man who coined the term "Electronic Frontier."
"Tell them how you travel, John!" yells Dyson, sitting behind him at an adjacent table.
"Well," rumbles Barlow, with the happy-scrabbly growl of a man who could never quite give up smoking, "sometimes I travel by bicycle, sometimes by computer, and sometimes – like the day before yesterday – I travel by Air Force Two."
Everyone hoots and cheers at this allusion to Barlow's (and therefore the Foundation's) triumph, hitching a ride with Gore from Los Angeles to San Francisco. It makes perfect sense that it was Barlow who scored this coup. Barlow, the traveler, knows everyone.
A Rancher's Soul
Picture a teenage John Perry Barlow, the consummate Young Rebel, bombing around Sublette County, Wyoming, on a beat-up Honda motorcycle, drunk and disorderly with a pack of pals, making a damn fool of himself, causing some of the elders in town to shake their heads and say, "Is this any way for a Barlow to behave?" It's the late 1950s.
Barlow: "I just got into trouble. At a certain point with kids, you just go bad. We all got motorcycles, we got Hondas. We became vandals. Got drunk."
This was not how Barlow's mother or father, a state senator, wanted John to turn out, so they packed him off to prep school. Fountain Valley High School, near Colorado Springs, Colorado, is important mainly in the Life of Barlow for introducing him to fellow student Robert Weir, who would go on to be a founding member of the Grateful Dead.
By 1970 Barlow himself had written his first song for the Dead and had just finished a novel called The Departures. It was about "looking for frontiers after there aren't any." It's never been published.
He did the starving hippie-artist thing in Manhattan. Bell-bottomed jeans. Wrote screenplays and more songs for the Dead. Did drugs and learned his way around the psychedelic frontier, even hung around with acid guru Timothy Leary and got the Dead to come visit Millbrook, New York, the hushed mecca of LSD-induced enlightenment.
The death of his father brought John Perry Barlow home to the Bar Plus Ranch, where 1,000 cud-chewing mother cows roamed on 7,000 acres. With American beef consumption in decline, though, Barlow looked for other ways to make money and, in 1986, bought a Compaq luggable computer as a writer's tool, "a better White Out."
Like Alice's looking glass, the Compaq took Barlow to some curioser and curioser places. An old friend, David Gans, who hosts the syndicated Grateful Dead Radio Hour, told Barlow about a place called the Well.
"He convinced me to get a modem and to log on to this thing so I could talk to Deadheads and hear what they had to say," Barlow says.
Barlow's great-granduncle had been the first white man to spend a winter in the upper headwaters of Wyoming's Green River, in 1875, and stories of that time had always resonated in Barlow. It's what Barlow was thinking about when he encountered cyberspace 111 years after his great-granduncle's adventure. "I thought it was amazing because it was like a small town. I'd been thinking a lot about small towns because mine was dying."
On a harsh December day in 1989, Barlow, now comfortably in his forties, was as oblivious as you can be to the brilliant light show that nature played daily on the mountains outside his window. He sat before the computer, awestruck and "zombiefied," as his whole TRW credit history spilled out across the screen, courtesy of a budding young hacker from Queens, New York, named Phiber Optik. This event was the climax of a ten- day, flame-filled online forum about hackers sponsored on the Well by Harper's magazine. (Phiber had put his modem where his mouth was to cap off a flame war he and Barlow engaged in during the forum.) Barlow sent e-mail to Phiber – "call me" – and Phiber did. They became friends, in a way the old rebel and the young one.
On Martin Luther King Day, January 15, 1990, AT&T's telephone network failed sensationally, disrupting service for hours in the Northeast. Suddenly, the words, "we're all connected," took on a new, darker meaning. Less than two weeks later, Phiber Optik and two fellow hackers in New York City were raided by the US Secret Service. Their computers were seized, but no charges were immediately filed. Most people, including
Barlow, believed erroneously that the raid was part of a nationwide hacker crackdown that had been dubbed Operation Sun Devil and was thought to be taking on mythic proportions.
A few months later, a field agent from the FBI office in Wyoming visited Barlow on the ranch to ask about the NuPrometheus League. Someone had mailed Barlow, as well as a number of other net.personalities, floppy disks containing pilfered and proprietary source code for the ROM chips in Apple's Macintosh computers. The three-hour interview with the agent convinced Barlow that technology was racing so far ahead of the rest of the world's comprehension that law enforcement was starting to show signs of dangerous confusion.
Barlow posted his thoughts on the Well, where, one day, several weeks later, Mitchell Kapor – who had just been visited by a NuPrometheus- investigating FBI man himself – read them, got the chill, and thought, "Wow, this just happened to me, too."
Philosophy and Spreadsheets
The entrees are starting to appear while the introductions continue. Around the private dining room they go, the board members and their friends. "Hi. I'm Bill Joy," says the Sun Microsystems founder. And here's Bruce Katz, who made his millions building up Rockport Shoes, then selling it to Reebok and buying the Well. And Doug Carlson, who describes himself as "soon to be ex-CEO" of Broderbund, the software company. "I'm looking for work that will be more stimulating," he says.
More people introduce themselves. There's newsletter publisher Denise Caruso, the Walter Winchell of Silicon Valley, and Jane Metcalfe, president of Wired magazine, who is about to be voted onto the EFF board herself. Here's David Liddle, the head of Interval Research Corp., a Silicon Valley deep-future think tank; and there's new board member Rob Glaser, who spent ten years with Microsoft before quitting to pursue public interest work.
And Mike Godwin, EFF's first employee. If you want to club this Merry Pranksters metaphor to death, then Godwin has got to be the Neil Cassady of the crew. (Cassady was the ever-present, ever-moving, bigger-than-life, bus-driving muse of the Merry Pranksters.) Godwin is a staff attorney at EFF. He's also a net.personality, always online, endlessly rapping and riffing, often off the law, quoting US Supreme Court Justice Brennan or Shakespeare, word for word, without a misquote. In person or on the phone he's the same, never stops talking, punctuating it all with his rapid-fire "right, right, right."
Mitch speaks: "Three-and-a-half years ago, we had a simple dinner here in San Francisco. Andy was there," he says nodding at the cherubic Andy Hertzfeld, co-founder of General Magic and one of the architects of the Apple Macintosh. "We have come a long way.... We were in the process of starting an organization that had the broad mission of settling cyberspace, extending civil liberties into cyberspace. John (Barlow) and I didn't really have a clue where it was going to go. The two of us had a shared intuition that this stuff wasn't going to be fringe, wasn't going to be exotic, was going to have an effect on everybody's life. I don't think we can even envision the scope of the social transformation that's going to happen."
He stops for a moment to let this idea settle in, then continues.
"We have evolved this into a combination of tactics, from down-and-dirty lobbying – which we do, I would say, in an extraordinarily principled way – with a high-minded evangelism. Creating a better future is a question of getting all the details right. John and I are refugees from the 1960s, trying to make it as adults in the 1990s, understanding that transforming consciousness takes some doing."
Kapor has been trying to transform consciousness for years now, starting with his own.
Picture a young Mitch Kapor standing on a railway platform in St. Moritz looking for a train in the middle of the night. It's 1976. The strap on his luggage dangles, broken, and he's shivering, pacing on the wrong side of the tracks for the London-bound train. People are yelling at him in a language he doesn't understand. It's dark and the temperature is hardly above freezing. He feels like he's making the Great Escape.
The 25-year-old Kapor had come to Switzerland for what had been advertised as an Enlightenment-or-Bust course at a Transcendental Meditation center. Fourteen hours of meditation a day was supposed to lead to – well, levitation. Instead, Kapor, a kid four years out of Yale University and at the end of a four-year-old marriage, has lost it. He's a mess, frankly, and has decamped in the middle of the night over the protests of his nonlevitating instructors.
How did the son of Phoebe and Jesse Kapor of Long Island, heir to their cardboard-box business, Corrugated Paper Products Inc. of Brooklyn, find himself in this condition?
Maybe his is the archetypal story of the '60s and '70s, the story of the American who tries everything to figure out who he is. "I felt there was something really wrong with me and I needed some kind of transformation experience to push myself out of myself."
Kapor had done LSD, of course, and despite bad experiences, had kept dropping acid until he found himself contemplating jumping out a second- story window into a concrete courtyard. There had to be a better way.
But he decided Transcendental Meditation in Switzerland wasn't it either.
Then in the late '70s, he recalls, after getting a master's in psychology and working as an attendant in a mental institution, Kapor was spending a lot of time in computer stores drooling over the first generation of personal computers. Kapor says: "I couldn't program worth a lick. There are people who can crank out code. I am not one of them. In those days, your status came from being a code jockey. I had a different talent: I could conceive of new kinds of programs and design them." It's the difference, he says, between being a construction worker and an architect.
In 1978, he recalls, when Apple cut the price of the Apple II to $1,500, he scraped together every cent he had and drove over the border to New Hampshire from the Boston area to buy one, thereby avoiding the sales tax. It's his own obsession with computers that made him pay attention years later to the plight of Phiber Optik and the gang.
One day shortly after buying his Apple II, Kapor, unemployed, was hanging around a computer store when a well-dressed man came in and started fawning over one. Kapor listened as the man (an ophthalmologist) asked all these questions trying to rationalize the purchase of this wonderful toy. Kapor went up to him and said, "I think I can help you." The job of computer tutor paid $5 an hour. Soon Kapor was an independent computer consultant.
He went to business school and dropped out. He spent six months at a Silicon Valley startup. Back in Boston, he met the authors of VisiCalc, the first spreadsheet program, and got an idea for a related application that would graph the results of a spreadsheet. He called it VisiPlot. Soon, the royalty checks for his programs started hitting $100,000 a month. A software publisher bought him and a partner out for $1.2 million.
Kapor was 29 years old in 1981, when he decided to raise the capital to start Lotus, a company that would publish the software application that is now generally credited with making the personal computer business take off. Lotus 1-2-3 is like VisiCalc and VisiPlot combined, but faster and better. It was the first program to use a working, on-screen help box, and it came with a tutorial on a floppy. Lotus even had a customer support department.
The biggest software application of the day was doing about $12 million a year in business. Kapor estimated that Lotus's would make $3 million to $4 million in its first year of operation. Lotus made $53 million that first year. The second year was better, with $156 million; the third-year revenues surged to $225 million.
And Kapor, the architect of Lotus 1-2-3, had never written a line of its code.
Four years after Lotus 1-2-3 shipped its first product in 1983, he left. "I just bailed. I hated it and I hated myself. I liked starting things, the hands-on aspect of it. But the job was different now. I couldn't handle the responsibility and I didn't like the power. I said to myself, 'Quit, go find out what you want to do with your life.' "
Which is what he was doing in 1989, when he read John Perry Barlow's postings about the visit from Agent Baxter of the FBI. Kapor had also gotten a copy of the Mac source code in the mail. And had received a visit from an FBI agent. That's when he reached out to Barlow.
Kapor and Barlow had met for the first time only a month before, when Barlow had been assigned to interview him. They grokked.
Kapor: "We were kindred spirits."
Barlow: "The first time I ever encountered Mitch, despite a great deal of differences, I felt that both of us had gone up in the same saucer at one time."
They talked about consciousness and the Net and the threat to civil liberties. Both believed they were on the threshold of a Net-borne Great Work, a wiring together of humanity that would restructure civilization. They talked for three hours, then fostered their face-to-face connection with e-mail, agreeing that they should do something together. But what?
Now, here was the answer: The world was running amok with police agents seizing people's computers without probable cause. There were Phiber Optik and the Boys in New York. Then came Steve Jackson – an adult, for God's sake – who runs Steve Jackson Games, a role-playing games business in Austin, Texas. Federal agents hauled off company computers in a raid, apparently (the Feds weren't saying just yet) because one of Jackson's employees was suspected of unspecified computer crimes. And who knew how far NuPrometheus would go? Was anyone safe? Confused federal agents seemed to be everywhere interrogating people about illicit computer code.
Kapor called Barlow and asked him if it would be OK to drop by. Barlow said sure. Kapor piloted his airplane to a landing strip in Pinedale, Wyoming, and spent an entire snowy afternoon with Barlow, discussing what they could do.
They met again a few months later, at a Chinese restaurant in San Francisco. Stewart Brand, founding publisher of the Whole Earth Catalog, was there, as was Jaron Lanier, the dreadlocked virtual reality explorer, and Paul Saffo, from the Institute for the Future, a Menlo Park-based think tank.
Everyone agreed on the need for a civil liberties organization to protect the citizens of cyberspace. The original name that had been floated on the Net was the Computer Liberty Foundation. But that didn't sit right with Barlow, who likened the current denizens of the Well and cyberspace to pioneers who "were able to tolerate harsh conditions, like fur traders."
Barlow came up with a name in that spirit: The Electronic Frontier Foundation.
The Holy Ghost
And now Barlow stares flat-eyed and earnest at the people sipping coffee, finishing the last bits of Roti supper. He says:
"There are people in this room who I think of as being the genuinely enlightened members of that community.... Now is the time you need to start helping out the community in a very material way. EFF has been an enormously expensive undertaking. It cost us three times as much to run last year as it did the previous year. If you get all your money from big corporations, you start behaving like one. We need a lot more support from smaller investors."
At the rear table, facing Barlow, sits a man with thinning long hair that hangs past his shoulders. He wears John Lennon glasses and a flannel shirt, jeans, and sandals. He's the only millionaire in the room who doesn't look like one, not in these clothes, not in the forlorn Mazda sedan he drives. This is the quiet man to whom Barlow has referred only moments before as the "mysterious third co-founder of EFF. The Holy Ghost. John Gilmore."
On a summer day in 1990, John Gilmore was sitting in his closet in the Haight Ashbury, thinking about pushing a button that would cost him $100,000. Minimum.
Gilmore was sitting in the closet – he really was – a closet that would be dark if not for the glow radiating from the Sun workstation in there with him. The guts of the machine were downstairs, connected by a cable to the terminal at which Gilmore was peering, wondering to himself, "Should I send this e-mail to Barlow or not?"
To: apple!well!barlow, pacbell!well!barlow Cc: gnu Subject: Computer Liberty Foundation Date: Sun, 10 Jun 90 14:50:47 -0700 From: gnu I've heard rumors about Mitch Kapor funding the defense of liberty on computers but last night I ran into Flash Gordon and he sent me a copy of your tome on Sun Devil, NuPrometheus and Computer Liberty Foundation. Hope you don't mind - you might mark it as redistributable if you want it to be that way. Personally I think it's written well enough that it should get major publication.... Anyway, my fortune is not up to matching contributions by Mitch Kapor and Steve Wozniak - but you can count me in for a hundred thousand or two. I do believe you're right that Sun Devil is a good excuse to get off our butts and set some precedents. I can spread the word to some of the Libertarian world if desired. Let me know. Also where to send a check. John
He stared at the message for a while, thinking about what this all might cost – not only in money, because money didn't mean much to Gilmore. But what it would cost him in energy and commitment and political capital to push the button and send the $100,000 message.
It was another philanthropist, Andrew Carnegie, who had given Gilmore his first taste of computing, by funding the little library in the small town where Gilmore grew up in western Pennsylvania. Gilmore had been reading about computers for years before he got his hands on one.
He had gotten through high school doing part-time summer work programming on big mainframes, before getting his first full-time job in the computer business in Washington, DC. During his four-year stint there as a code writer he would sneak onto the Internet's precursor, the ARPAnet through a guest account at MIT's artificial intelligence lab. Gilmore had always been a kind of hacker, had definitely done his time using illicit Net connections or pilfered calling-card numbers to support his Net jones. How else were you going to learn about this stuff?
He also read science fiction, a lot of it, and dropped acid a bunch of times, and along the way developed a real distaste for Authority.
"It was probably drugs more than anything else that made me a Libertarian," Gilmore says.
Then in 1982, a startup called Sun Microsystems was founded in Mountain View, California, and Gilmore was brought on board there from the beginning. The company was looking for someone to port Unix to its larval workstation. Gilmore was the fifth employee hired and Sun's first software guy. Three-and-a-half years later, the company had swollen from 5 to 1,100 employees. Gilmore's Sun stock options had swollen, too – to "a few million dollars."
Gilmore: "Sun had gotten too big and bureaucratic. I'm the kind of person who works best in a less structured environment. I retired, a millionaire before I was 30."
Now, like Kapor, Gilmore had to figure out what, if he could do anything in the world, he would do. "What do you really want?" he asks himself. "I could take 2 to 3 percent of my brain cells and advise people doing startups."
Nah.
Along with his stock, Gilmore took a workstation from Sun, which he set up in the closet – a way of physically keeping his computer life separate from the rest of his life. Like a lot of people, Gilmore had noticed that a computer could be a black hole that sucks you in when you walk by. So he put the box in an out-of-the-way place. Sometimes he just sat there and read his e-mail and toured various Usenet groups, which is how he heard about Operation Sun Devil and Steve Jackson Games and Phiber Optik. And how he came to be sitting in the closet with a $100,000 message on his screen.
He pushed the button, of course.
Bad PR
The waiters at the bistro are fanning around the room, removing dinner plates and taking dessert orders. Jerry Berman, EFF's executive director, is tiptoeing around the thorniest moment in EFF history, the move from its birthplace in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to Washington, DC. Berman looks like a thin Buddha; he is, in fact, half Hawaiian and half Jewish (raised Catholic) and a civil-rights lawyer educated at the University of California at Berkeley. And he feels at home in Washington.
"A decision was made by EFF, after a lot of Sturm und Drang – which I think is part of net culture too – to move to Washington, DC," Berman says, not elaborating, really, on what all that Sturm und Drang was about.
Here's what is was about: In January 1991, the staff of the EFF was called to a small meeting room in the American Twine building, one of those resurrected industrial buildings, sand-blasted and yuppified, that Cambridge is so fond of. Just about everyone knew what was going to happen next, which didn't balm the sting of it, not one bit. Kapor stood up and said EFF was moving its headquarters to Washington. And then he handed out personalized envelopes, explaining what everyone's severance pay would be.
Within moments of the event, word hit the Net, thanks to two eff.org sysops in the basement of the Twine building. Soon the message was replicated to the far corners of Netdom.
A lot of people believed, and believe to this day, that EFF was cutting its connection to regular Net folk by moving to DC. In many ways, "Old Inside- The-Beltway Jerry" as he sometimes refers to himself, came to be seen as the root of all evil, since he precipitated the move.
Now, as the dinner plates are being cleared and the smell of hot coffee wafts across the room, Berman says the move from Cambridge only made EFF better at helping the Little Guy. "It was not our intent to abandon that particular mission, but to strengthen it."
Berman talks a bit about how he came from the American Civil Liberties Union, where he ran a project that surveyed the dangers to personal freedom that could arise in the chaos of the information revolution. He takes credit for "persuading John and John and Mitch and the original board that if they wanted to maintain the freedom and culture of openness on the Net" they'd have to get their hands dirty and wage their fight in Washington. They'd have to "be involved in wheeling and dealing with people you don't always consider your friends ... (in) not always working with people who are pure and good."
David Liddle, who worked on the 8010 Star (the 1981 workstation that incorporated the first friendly user interface and provided inspiration for the Mac) at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center and knows something about getting things done, jumps in. "One doesn't get very much credit for facing these realities," he says. "That is the thing that's made the difference – that's why EFF's voice has gotten heard."
"Internally, that has probably been the source of more struggles than any other clash of two cultures," says Kapor. "For me, going to Washington has been incredibly stimulating ... watching how power works. Trying to reverse-engineer the architecture of the Beltway has been interesting."
Denise Caruso, playing journalist, now asks, "At this point, do you have more or less respect for the government? Is there intelligent life in Washington?"
"Right now, a number of us are feeling pretty good," Kapor replies. But, he adds, "large systems, whether the government or private, have an inhumanity to them that's fundamentally intolerable."
"Going to Washington was a real shock," says Dyson. "It is really sleazy and very depressing to realize how this country works. On the other hand, it's very exciting to realize that these are a bunch of people from our generation. In quotes, they 'get it.' "
But, she continues, "After ten to fifteen years in that system, I'm scared they're going to turn into the people they replaced. That's why we have to change the system."
Conversation becomes spirited, stories are being told, digressions occur. People start talking about the Open Platform and what it will be like. Will all content be permitted on the Open Platform? What about cigarette advertising? A smokers' listserv?
Will a rating system be needed?
Dinner finally ends. The board members and their guests wander out, left to ponder whether real political power can come from a modem. Some of them head home, others to hotels.
One of them, Stewart Brand, heads to his boat.
Furthur
Stewart Brand is the only board member who really was a Merry Prankster. If you knew Brand back in the days when, higher than the Pope, he raced a psychedelic bus down a mountain near Taos, New Mexico, you might not recognize him now. Brand was the guy who started the first Trips Festival, a multimedia and acid-dropping fest. He went on to found, edit, and publish the Whole Earth Catalog and CoEvolution Quarterly. He also co-founded the Well and the Global Business Network, which helps companies like Bell South, Nissan, and ABC News develop business strategies in line with the information revolution.
Brand believes in tools, in giving people instruments that empower them, allow them to control their environment. He is the kind of man who always carries a pocket knife and wears various small leather tool holsters on his belt. The Whole Earth Catalog was a tool catalog. The EFF is about empowering people through the tool of networking.
Brand lives in a renovated tugboat in Sausalito and works in a dry-docked shrimp boat. He has a library in a storage container down the pier, and has cut skylights in it so he can work there. A Stanford-educated biologist, Brand just finished a book on how buildings learn.
He is too smart to buy into yet another Utopia.
"One advantage of working with survivors of the '60s is, we've had experience in creating utopias," he says of his fellow board members. "We've had our noses rubbed in our fondest fantasies."
It's a few days after the quarterly EFF dinner, and Brand is sitting on the deck of his (house) boat, intent as an American bald eagle. Over his shoulder you can see the wreck of a ferry boat that was inhabited by Alan Watts some 30 years ago and later by the Zen Center. Software developers live all around Brand now, in other remodeled houseboats that give Sausalito its counterculture charm. You have to work hard to ignore the feeling that one zeitgeist has given way to another.
The old Merry Prankster can't help getting swept up in this new movement, though he knows better.
"I sometimes tingle mildly to Barlow's reference to a Great Work," he says. "There is a truly profound reconfiguring of society occurring, and it is thrilling to be a part of that process."
But then he catches himself and qualifies his optimism: "It's nice to have a domain where one is relatively confident of not doing harm."
More than twenty-five years ago, the Merry Pranksters climbed aboard a bus named Furthur and left California to change the world. They're still at it.
