Life & Wisdom Quote by John Perry Barlow

A manifesto disguised as a polite dismissal, Barlow’s line turns disembodiment into both shield and weapon. “Our identities have no bodies” isn’t just cyber-poetry; it’s jurisdictional brinkmanship. If the state’s oldest tool is physical force, then a realm that can’t be hauled into a courtroom or a jail cell poses an almost taunting problem: how do you govern people who can slip the leash by logging off, rerouting, encrypting, or reappearing under another name?

The subtext is classic 1990s cyber-libertarianism: the internet as a new territory whose social order will self-assemble out of “ethics” and “enlightened self-interest,” a kind of digital civic religion. The phrase “unlike you” draws a bright moral line between meatspace authority (coercive, blunt, compromised) and networked life (voluntary, rational, emergent). It’s not subtle: Barlow flatters the online world as post-violent, post-sovereign, almost post-human.

Context matters. This comes out of the era when the web still felt like a frontier and governments were starting to wake up to its power (speech, commerce, sex, piracy, organizing). Barlow, a former Grateful Dead lyricist and co-founder of the EFF, is writing as an evangelist for the idea that code and community norms can substitute for cops and courts.

What makes it work is the rhetorical pivot: he concedes the state’s strength, then renders it irrelevant. It’s also the line’s tell. “No bodies” reads liberating until you remember who gets to be “bodyless”: the privileged users who can afford abstraction, while real-world harms still land on real bodies.