It’s a perfect set of circumstances to give us the time Yeats foretold, with the best having lost all conviction and the worst full of passionate intensity. I’m an optimist. In order to be libertarian, you have to be an optimist. You have to have a benign view of human nature, to believe that human beings left to their own devices are basically good. But I’m not so sure about human institutions .... Most libertarians are worried about government but not worried about business. I think we need to be worrying about business in exactly the same way we are worrying about government.
-- John Perry Barlow (1947 - 2018), American poet, essayist, and founding member of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, "John Perry Barlow 2.0", interview by Brian Doherty in ReasonOnline (August 2004)
No comments:
Post a Comment