https://www.mantlethought.org/philosophy/edward-snowden-john-perry-barlow-and-new-american-frontier

On June 5, 2014, one could say that Edward Snowden sat down with John Perry Barlow for a conversation about the future of cyberspace.

To be precise, however, Snowden sat down with a computer screen in Russia and interfaced with Barlow who sat with a live audience at New York University as part of the Personal Democracy Forum. If multi-modality is important in assessing argument, it is perhaps important to note that Snowden’s head, about twenty times the size of life on the NYU movie screen, presided over the crowd with Barlow’s mug captioned in the corner, about a tenth the size of Snowden’s. This convergence of faces and voices was transmitted to the live New York audience, and then later uploaded to YouTube. “It’s a pity you can’t see the audience,” Barlow says at the beginning of the conversation. “They’re as happy as they would be if you were here.” And so, with this first appropriative claim, begins the public dialogue of two men loosely bound together through the organization Barlow co-founded, the EFF.