Politics & Power Quote by John Perry Barlow

Barlow is poking at a blind spot that libertarianism often treats as a feature: the reflex to see coercion only when it wears a badge. Coming from a writer who helped mythologize the early internet as a frontier beyond state control, the line reads less like a partisan jab than a hard-earned correction. He’s saying: you don’t get to declare yourself anti-authoritarian while giving corporations a moral hall pass.

The intent is symmetrical suspicion. Government can tax, police, and regulate; business can surveil, price-gouge, blacklist, monopolize, and quietly rewrite the terms of daily life through contracts no one reads. One power is public and legible, the other private and deniable. That asymmetry is the subtext: libertarians know how to fear visible power, but often underestimate the softer, market-branded forms of compulsion that arrive as “choice.”

The quote also anticipates a cultural shift. In the 1990s, “big government” was the villain in tech-adjacent libertarian imagination; today, platform capitalism has made private power feel infrastructural. Your speech, work, and relationships are increasingly mediated by companies that set rules, adjudicate disputes, and collect intelligence at scale. Barlow’s phrasing - “in exactly the same way” - is deliberately blunt, almost prosecutorial. It collapses the comforting distinction between state and market and asks a sharper question: if freedom is the goal, why pretend only one kind of institution can take it away?