John Perry Barlow (October 3, 1947 – February 7, 2018) was an American poet, essayist, cattle rancher, and cyberlibertarian[1] political activist who had been associated with both the Democratic and Republican parties.

[7] He grew up on Bar Cross Ranch in Cora, Wyoming, a 22,000-acre (8,900 ha) property his great-uncle founded in 1907, and attended elementary school in a one-room schoolhouse.

[10] In his senior year, he became a part-time resident of New York City's East Village and immersed himself in Andy Warhol's Factory demimonde, cultivating a friendship with Rene Ricard and developing a brief addiction to heroin.

[12] As he neared graduation, Barlow was admitted to Harvard Law School and was contracted to write a novel by Farrar, Straus and Giroux at the behest of his mentor, the autodidactic Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist and historian Paul Horgan.

[13] Initially supported by a $5,000 or $1,000[13] advance from the publisher,[10] he decided to eschew these options in favor of spending the next two years traveling around the world, including a nine-month sojourn in India, a riotous winter in a summer cottage on Long Island Sound in Connecticut,[13] and a screenwriting foray in Los Angeles.

As a frequent visitor during college to Timothy Leary's facility in Millbrook, New York, Barlow was introduced to LSD; he later claimed to have consumed the substance over 1,000 times.

He went on to facilitate the first meeting between the Grateful Dead and the Leary organization (who recognized each other as kindred souls in spite of their differing philosophical approaches) in June 1967.

Dismayed by the situation, Barlow changed his plans and began practicing animal husbandry under the auspices of the Bar Cross Land and Livestock Company in Cora, Wyoming, for almost two decades.

[10] In the meantime, Barlow was still able to play an active role in the Grateful Dead while recruiting many unconventional part-time ranch hands from the mainstream as well as the counterculture.

[16] Prior to his death in 2018, John Byrne Cooke intended to produce a documentary film (provisionally titled The Bar Cross Ranch) that documented this era.

A feud erupted backstage over a couplet in "Sugar Magnolia" from the band's most recent release (most likely "She can dance a Cajun rhythm/Jump like a Willys in four-wheel drive"), culminating in a disgruntled Hunter summoning Barlow and telling him "take [Weir]—he's yours".

They co-wrote songs such as "Cassidy", "Mexicali Blues" and "Black-Throated Wind", all three of which remained in the repertoires of the Grateful Dead and of Weir's varied solo projects.

Imagine a new world with more resources than all our future greed might exhaust, more opportunities than there will ever be entrepreneurs enough to exploit, and a peculiar kind of real estate that expands with development.

Imagine a place where trespassers leave no footprints, where goods can be stolen infinite number of times and yet remain in the possession of their original owners, where business you never heard of can own the history of your personal affairs.

The act of finding a port into cyberspace would be part of the adventure… Before I left, I believed Africans could proceed directly from the agricultural epoch into an information economy without having to submit to the dreary indignities and social pathologies of industrialization".

[38] Barlow also returned to writing lyrics, most recently with The String Cheese Incident's mandolinist and vocalist Michael Kang, including their song "Desert Dawn".

He was seen many times with Carolyn Garcia (whose monologue is dubbed on the eponymous track "Mountain Girl"[39]) at their concerts mixing with the fans and members in the band, and was a close friend of String Cheese Incident producer Jerry Harrison.

Barlow was a spiritual mentor and student of Kemp Muhl and Sean Lennon,[40] collaborating with their band The Ghost of a Saber Tooth Tiger and making a cameo in their 2014 music video "Animals".

[62] In his final years, Barlow spent much of his time on the road, lecturing about and consulting on civil rights, freedom of speech, the state of the internet and the EFF.

He delivered lectures and panel discussions at TWiT Live,[63] TedxHamburg, Hamburg (Germany),[64] Greenfest SF,[65] Civitas (Norwegian think tank),[66] Internet Society (New York Chapter),[67] the USC Center on Public Diplomacy,[68] and the European Graduate School.

[70] On September 8, 2014, Barlow was the first speaker in the Art, Activism, and Technology: The 50th Anniversary of the Free Speech Movement colloquium series at University of California, Berkeley.

[75] He was Vice President at Algae Systems, a Nevada-based company with a working demo-scale pilot plant in Daphne, Alabama, dedicated to commercializing novel methods at the water-energy nexus for growing microalgae offshore as a second-generation biofuels feedstock and converting it to useful crude via hydrothermal liquefaction, while simultaneously treating wastewater, reducing carbon dioxide in Earth's atmosphere, and producing biochar.

At Startup Grind Jackson Hole on March 13, 2015, Barlow said that he was motivated to team up with Algae Systems after undergoing back surgery to address pain from an old ranching injury, while he had been an advisor to Herb Allison (president of Merrill Lynch at the time) and working to completely "electronify" financial transactions and speculative asset assembly.

At Startup Grind Jackson Hole, Barlow also explained how once over tea with "Grandmother of the Conservation Movement" Mardy Murie, he was inspired by her words, "Environmentalists can be a pain in the ass… But they make great ancestors".

[78][79] A stir in the media transpired when retired U.S. Army general Wesley Clark attended Burning Man in 2013 and spent time with Barlow and Harvey.

[83] The iPhone app Detour, released in February 2015 by Groupon founder and ex-CEO Andrew Mason, features a 75-minute audio tour narrated by Barlow as he walks through the Tenderloin neighborhood in downtown San Francisco.

She died unexpectedly in 1994 while asleep on a flight from Los Angeles to New York City, days before her 30th birthday, from a heart arrhythmia apparently caused by undetected viral myocarditis.

[96][97] In a piece for Nerve, "A Ladies Man and Shameless: A Polygamist's Manifesto",[98] Barlow professed his love of many women at the same time, and summarized the relationships in his personal life: "I doubt I'll ever be monogamous again ...

[104] A concert held on October 11, 2016, to benefit the fund at Sweetwater Music Hall in Mill Valley, California, featured Weir, Ramblin' Jack Elliott, Jerry Harrison, Les Claypool, Robin Sylvester, Jeff Chimenti, Steve Kimock, Sean Lennon, Lukas Nelson, and members of The String Cheese Incident.