The Sad Story of the Internet

The death of John Perry Barlow – cyberlibertarian, founder member of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Freedom of the Press Foundation, sometime Grateful Dead lyricist, and much more (check out his Wikipedia entry) – got me thinking about two things, aside from mortality. One was of course the Grateful Dead; the other was how much the online world has changed since those heady days when Barlow and his fellow techno-utopians could envision the internet as 'a world where anyone, anywhere may express his or her beliefs, no matter how singular, without fear of being coerced into silence or conformity'. If only.
 I came relatively late to the online world, with little idea of what I was doing, but in retrospect I realise I took the plunge at the best possible moment, when blogs, in all their magnificent, sometimes mad individuality, were riding high. Before, that is, the rise of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and the rest. Not only did (and do) blogs offer superior content, they are also, by their very nature, resistant to centralised control – of the kind exerted by Facebook, Twitter and YouTube – and happily incapable of doing the damage wrought unceasingly by fatuous Twitterstorms, online harassment and shaming. Blogs generate only small, loose networks, whereas, by sharing and retweeting, newer social media can create networks of almost unlimited size, sending cascading waves of hysteria spreading across the echo chamber of cyberspace in less time than it takes to think.
 Blogs, it seems, are now decidedly vieux jeu, an oldsters' playground, too close to the essay form for today's frantic, pixellated world, and this seems to me very sad. The golden age of the blog was the golden age of the internet, and it was all too brief. (My own steadily declining stats tell the story all too clearly, not that it bothers me much – I care more about who my readers are than how many.)
 But never mind all that – here's a fine Grateful Dead song for which the late John Perry Barlow wrote the lyrics...

Pigpen: Forever One of the Grateful Dead

On this day in 1973, the short, often sad life of Ron 'Pigpen' McKernan, founder member and erstwhile lead singer and presiding spirit of the Grateful Dead, came to an end. He was 27 years old and he essentially died of drink, having turned his back on mind-bending drugs in favour of whiskey and wine (as did his close friend Janis Joplin). McKernan also resisted the Dead's move from a raw, blues-based sound into more experimental psychedelic noodling. A blues man through and through, Pigpen was increasingly sidelined as the band broke through with their two great studio albums, Workingman's Dead and American Beauty, and, as his health began to break down, he eventually had to leave the band. His death, soon after his departure, shattered the remaining band members, who over the coming years worked songs that Pigpen had made his own (notably Good Lovin' and Turn On Your Love Light) back into their live performances.
 'Pigpen was and is now forever one of the Grateful Dead,' reads the inscription on his gravestone in Alta Mesa Memorial Park. Here he is in his one and only vocal appearance on that classic album American Beauty - the country blues Operator...