I'm sure he was charismatic. So reputedly is Scott Siskind. Both have authored a lot of entertaining predictions. Each is or was so far as I know many things himself, but neither has ever even remotely approached the knowledge to practice even as a novice technologist. Windbags the both of them, in other words.
I respect some of his work, but none that lay in the vein you describe. To speak of a nonexistent territory's sovereignty, when it is solely "inhabited" by machines and people with physical names and addresses, is absurd and risible. Indeed Barlow's entire ignorant, ideologically propagandistic identitarian grift - an early precursor and lineal ancestor of Cliven Bundy and "sovereign citizens"/"freemen on the land"/"Qanon" alike - is in my view directly culpable for much of same and much else destructive about the accidents of the technology's development to date.
And what he produced that does have merit, so far as I can tell, as here lacks all originality.
I respect some of his work, but none that lay in the vein you describe. To speak of a nonexistent territory's sovereignty, when it is solely "inhabited" by machines and people with physical names and addresses, is absurd and risible. Indeed Barlow's entire ignorant, ideologically propagandistic identitarian grift - an early precursor and lineal ancestor of Cliven Bundy and "sovereign citizens"/"freemen on the land"/"Qanon" alike - is in my view directly culpable for much of same and much else destructive about the accidents of the technology's development to date.
And what he produced that does have merit, so far as I can tell, as here lacks all originality.