Alex Brook Lynn

One of the more fascinating threads in my book traces the intersection of US military strategy and the Grateful Dead. In 1996 RAND published a strategy paper on information warfare that argued the Internet is "blurring clear boundaries," including boundaries that define a sovereign nation-state. That same year, the former Grateful Dead lyricist John Perry Barlow delivered a famous speech at the Davos World Economic Forum addressed to the “governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel." Barlow speaks in a different register, but his countercultural cyberutopianism resonates with the RAND report. "I  come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind," Barlow declared. His message to the weary giants: "You have no sovereignty where we gather.” Barlow and the RAND authors were both trying to explain and master a phenomenon larger than any particular ideology. That is the force of the Internet itself, a global communications architecture built to protect American national interests, which, by extending its power over the globe, began erasing the concept of nation itself. The full story in THE INFORMATION STATE: POLITICS IN THE AGE OF TOTAL CONTROL. Buy it here: us.macmillan.com/books/97812…