Making common sense of cyberlibertarian ideology: The journalistic consecration of John Perry Barlow

Abstract

Abstract This study critiques the way in which journalism and other media used John Perry Barlow, an early Internet enthusiast, as a source to make common sense of cyberlibertarian ideology as the Internet emerged as a dominant communications technology in the 1990s and early-2000s. During this period, journalists used Barlow, someone with no technical expertise but a reputation as a prophet of the new technology, to translate the deregulatory, conservative ideals of free markets and speech so central to cyberlibertarianism for mass consumption. In the process, Barlow and these journalists depoliticized a central political question about the Internet that remains today: how and how much it should be regulated. This amplification of cyberlibertarianism as doxa in popular discourses during this period helped foreclose on alternative conceptions of the Internet not only in the press but also in discussions of policy.