A list of 25 Principles of Adult Behavior by John Perry

Barlow
posted by Jason Kottke Feb 08, 2018

Silicon Valley visionary John Perry Barlow died last night at the age of 70.
When he was 30, the EFF founder (and sometime Grateful Dead lyricist) drew
up a list of what he called Principles of Adult Behavior. They are:

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. Expect no more of anyone 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. Never 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 soon.
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.

Here’s what these principles meant to Barlow:

I don’t expect the perfect attainment of these principles. However, I post them
as a standard for my conduct as an adult. Should any of my friends or
colleagues catch me violating one of them, bust me.

You can read remembrances of Barlow from the EFF and from his
friends Cory Doctorow and Steven Levy. The EFF’s Executive Director Cindy
Cohn wrote:

Barlow was sometimes held up as a straw man for a kind of naive techno-
utopianism that believed that the Internet could solve all of humanity’s
problems without causing any more. As someone who spent the past 27 years
working with him at EFF, I can say that nothing could be further from the truth.
Barlow knew that new technology could create and empower evil as much as
it could create and empower good. He made a conscious decision to focus on
the latter: “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.’”

Barlow’s lasting legacy is that he devoted his life to making the Internet into “a
world that all may enter without privilege or prejudice accorded by race,
economic power, military force, or station of birth … a world where anyone,
anywhere may express his or her beliefs, no matter how singular, without fear
of being coerced into silence or conformity.”