The jury's well out on the great man thing. On the other hand, I'm willing to accept it when someone calls me a good man. I've been working on that one quite consciously for a long time. And, outside of being a good ancestor, it's my primary ambition.

In fact, the night before I turned 30, I found myself so surprised to have reached an age of indisputable adult that I wrote up a set of "adult principles" that I've been trying to live up to for 35 years.

In fact, here they are:

ADULT PRINCIPLES -John Perry Barlow

1 Be patient. No matter what.

2 Don't badmouth: Assign responsibility, not blame. Say nothing of another you wouldn't say to him.

3 Never assume the motives of others are, to them, less noble than yours are to you.

4 Expand your sense of the possible.

5 Don't trouble yourself with matters you truly cannot change.

6 Don't ask more of others than you can deliver yourself.

7 Tolerate ambiguity.

8 Laugh at yourself frequently.

9 Concern yourself with what is right rather than who is right.

10 Try not to forget that, no matter how certain, you might be wrong.

11 Give up blood sports.

12 Remember that your life belongs to others as well. Don't risk it frivolously.

13 Never lie to anyone for any reason. (Lies of omission are sometimes exempt.)

14 Learn the needs of those around you and respect them.

15 Avoid the pursuit of happiness. Seek to define your mission and pursue that.

16 Reduce your use of the first personal pronoun.

17 Praise at least as often as you disparage.

18 Admit your errors freely and quickly.

19 Become less suspicious of joy.

20 Understand humility.

21 Remember that love forgives everything.

22 Foster dignity.

23 Live memorably.

24 Love yourself.

25 Endure.

Well, folks... I've been at this for about two and a half hours. I hope you all found reason to support the cause I did this to support. But my fingers are starting to get all rubbery and my sentences unfilled with numerous missing words. I"m really grateful to all of you for coming. It felt cool to have you "here." I'd love to do this again sometime.

And now I'm off to attend the wake of a friend who hasn't died yet. He knows he's done for, and very soon, so he thought he get his friends together to say all the nice things we'd ordinarily say over his unappreciative coffin.

Truck on, y"all...

Tough question. You can also donate to my more recent foundation, The Freedom of the Press Foundation https://pressfreedomfoundation.org/ which I co-founded with Dan Ellsberg, Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras, John Cusack, Xeni Jardin, and Trevor Timm and Rainey Reitman from EFF. We're funding WikiLeaks and other initiatives of its sort and trying to inspire new ones. Let a thousand leaks spring. Let so much be revealed that the government gives up on secrecy as a way of assuring power.

Wow. That's almost 50 years worth of memories... There are a lot to choose from, but I'm pretty fond of the time we were playing the football stadium and the University of Colorado and one of those biblical Front Range thunderstorms popped over the ridge and walked toward us on legs of lightning. The stage and sound system had been designed by Bear to be a ""floating ground" so immediately there was St. Elmo's fire all over everything.

Lightning struck all over around the stadium. Killed one fan. And the rain formed in this great canopy over the band. It was about to fall and crush everybody when I and another guy jumped up and started cutting holes in it. I got mine where the water could get to the ground, but one of his dumped onto the stage. Suddenly the stage had 2 inches of water on it and the band was still playing.

THEN, somebody in cutoffs came onstage with a Skilsaw, knelt down in the water and started cutting holes in the stage while everyone around him jumped for cabinets. I don't know why he wasn't electrocuted. Or, for that matter, why the band, which went on playing, was electrocuted either.

I'm actually guardedly optimistic that we will prevail in the long run. Gradually the institutions themselves will see the completely disproportionality of the threat and the responses.

Depends on the weapon. He can, has, and always will beat the living shit out of me in the song-writing category. No contest. The only reason he hasn't driven me to commit ritual suicide is that I always knew that it would be a monoculture without other voices. And I don't like mono cultures.

On the other hand, if we were competing with handguns, it would be over quickly. I'm a very accurate shot with a S&W .357 Magnum.

Actually, I got a phone call from Phiber Optik, who is now back to being Mark Abene. He now lives in San Jose, has one small child and another soon to arrive, a successful Infosec company and a life. It was so great to hear from him. We are very excited to get together again. Meanwhile, we're still fighting exactly the same war we were then. It's just a lot bigger and more complicated than it was in those halcyon day.

The meaning of life is that we insert our souls into the Physical World so that love will make sense. On the other side of the spiritual membrane, everything is made of love, but it's meaningless in a sense without context. So it comes here to contrast with fear, entropy, doubt, cruelty... all the dark things that are not love.

Also, I think that the secret of life is learning to accept love. Giving it is easy accepting it is hard.