"I knew that we were building the most penetrating and total surveillance system that could be imagined, and I was no more comfortable with the Googles (which didn’t exist but predictably would) who would peer out through those All-Seeing Eyes than I was with an equally enhanced NSA, Chinese Government, or United States Cyber Command.
However, just as Alan Kay said, “The best way to predict the future is to invent it,” I knew it’s also true that a good way to invent the future is to predict it.
So I predicted Utopia, hoping to give Liberty a running start before the laws of Moore and Metcalfe delivered up what Ed Snowden now correctly calls “turn-key totalitarianism.” Which is now available to a number of secretive institutions, public and private (not that there’s a useful distinction)"
-- Letter to the Editor from John Perry Barlow to the Wash. Post (sent in response to J. Silverman, The Internet’s First Anarchist, WASH.POST, Mar. 22, 2015 (evening edition)).