It was 25 years ago today that there happened in San Francisco something called a Human Be-In. It was amazing because without any publicity, without any commercial advertising, something like 50 or 60,000 people arrived in Golden Gate Park to celebrate something new. And you know what that new thing is, its a new renaissance, a new spirit of freedom, of individuality, of breaking away from the old authorities. I'll talk more about what happened, but first I want to say that it was a beautiful day in San Francisco, 25 years ago a parachuter parachuted right down into the audience, and the Grateful Dead was there and the young rock and rollers in San Francisco, and Allen Ginsberg was there, and I was there. Now, what was interesting about this, that nobody could explain, how come 60,000 people would come together on a Sunday like this without and promotion or commercial advertising? You know what, the same thing happened in New York about four months later. You know what happened, two years later in Washington D.C., a million people mobilized to stop the war in Viet Nam. Suddenly this "people power" this notion of something - by the way, there were no arms, there were no guns, there was no threat, it was people coming together peaceably to just show that they weren't going to be pushed around anymore. Now, this was not new, it's been happening throughout human history. It's called a renaissance, and every hundred 500 years it happens again, it happened in Italy, in what the 14th century, it happened in Athens with Socrates, people get together and say we're going to start something new. This was a wonderful movement because by 1976 we had stopped the war in Viet Nam, we were investigating the CIA, can you believe that. But what always happens, you know what happens, when you overthrow the tyranny, there is moment of freedom and then of course the hard-liners move in. So in 1980 the hard-liners moved in in America, but you know what happened, in Europe, in England, in Spain, finally in Eastern Europe, the same message of people getting together without arms, young people, with that spirit, with that glow, with that look in their eyes, like Woodstock, the sense of a new breed - "we're not going to take orders anymore." The time we watched the Berlin Wall, the greatest jail break in history. You know, the greatest tyranny in history: it happened in China with Tiannaman Square, and of course the hard-liners come in. This movement is happening over and over again, and we celebrate the joy of freedom and individuality and looking into each others eyes and smiling, but then, you know and I know that the hard-liners come back. I am going to tell you frankly, that the next 8 years are going to be tough, because the problem with freedom is, that once you free people, most of us don't know how to handle freedom and we start fighting among each other, so the next few years until the year 2000, are going to rough in American, it's going to be rough in Europe, its going to be rougher in the Eastern European countries. And I want to tell you, the solution is, it's the old Socratic notion: "Believe in yourself" - have a small group of friends who share your belief, you'll find networking, use electronics, use fax, use camcorders, keep the message going, because this time, we are not going to lose, by the year 2000, the spirit that started in San Francisco 25 years ago, and emerged in Washington, and emerged in the Isle of Wight with Dylan, which emerged in Berlin, which emerged in Tiannaman Square, and that wonderful Yeltsin thing in Moscow - it's going to keep going, but you've got to be true to yourself and your friends, and link up, and we're going to make it happen!

John Barlow from Wyoming via time delayed video at the New Human Be-In (4th Annual Digital Be-In and 25th Anniversary of the Human Be-In - January 14, 1992)

Hi. This is John Perry Barlow, or rather the virtual John Perry Barlow, coming at you from Pinedale Wyoming, which is very much part of the physical world. I was present for the first Human Be-In, so I suppose it is only appropriate that I would take this form for this one, since we seem to be moving into an age of insubstantiality. Michael Gosney asked me to talk about the "new human" and I think it is helpful to back up and talk about the human that we had back before January 14, 1967, which was in this country a critter that was very much a function of whatever authority had been set up above him. We believed in God and DwightEisenhower, and Dad and a whole lot of other people whose authority we didn't question much. What happened in 1967 was the beginning of the end of God-given authority and the elevation of the individual. Sometimes to a degree that not only society but even the most individualistic of us found a little discomforting. One of the great tools of that revolution was the personal computer, which has profoundly empowered the individual by giving every one of us the equivalent of a printing press. Well now, when I think of the new human that is emerging now, I think of that with a capital "H" in a much more collective sense. Having empowered the individual, I think that computers are now becoming less printing presses and more communications tools, which will be used in what I call "the great work" - hardwiring collective human consciousness, creating that being which is all of us. I am not particularly concerned about loss of individuality in the collective here because these things as communications devices will be enormously powerful in stopping tyranny as we saw during the coup in the Soviet Union last summer. There was no way that the traditional hierarchy of the information flow that the KGB and the plotter were trying to impose could compete with the redundancy of the computerized net and that will increasingly be the case everywhere. Nevertheless, I think that we are starting to recoalesce, having abolished authority in many respects, we are now starting to recreate it in a much more anarchistic sense. And I am pleased to be a part of both processes, and I hope you are too. I am sorry I can't be with you here tonight, but I hope you all have a good time. Thanks --

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