John Perry Barlow

In an article in The Hill today, Gautham Nagesh reports that Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) co-founder John Perry Barlow speaking at the Personal Democracy Forum (PDF) in New York on Thursday said that the deluge of information available on the web has rendered the United States ungovernable. The former Grateful Dead songwriter said those disppointed in President Barack Obama are disregarding the extent to which the political system is broken. Barlow blamed the Beltway establishment, which he said is loathe to give up any accumulated influence. Barlow argued that citizens by necessity will increasingly have to organize at the local level around the issues most important to them in order to get things done. Barlow said:

"There is a circle of fat around the Beltway that is incredibly thick. We can no longer try to run this country from the center. We've got to run it, just like the Internet, from the edges."

Barlow also had some harsh words for search engine leader Google, which he compared to the Catholic Church:

Craig Newmark -- founder of Craigslist -- encourages everyone to attend this year's Personal Democracy Forum (PDF) to be held this summer in New York City, June 3-4. They expect a really great group of folks to talk about liberation technologies including Jimmy Wales, Julian Assange, Daniel Ellsberg, Evgeny Morozov, Ory Okolloh, Ethan Zuckerman, Cheryl Contee, John Perry Barlow, Clay Shirky, Howard Rheingold, Tim O'Reilly, Aneesh Chopra, Beth Kanter, Allison Fine, Esther Dyson, Anil Dash, Jen Pahlka, Bryan Sivak, and Susan Crawford.