For instance, when Congress passed the Communications Decency Act, aimed at protecting minors by criminalizing "indecency" on the Internet, the EFF joined the ACLU to challenge the law, and in 1997 the Supreme Court ruled it to be unconstitutional. Thus, very early in the range war that's being fought more aggressively each day, the Internet was declared a free speech zone. The Geeks went up 1-0.

His connection to both the Haight-Ashbury hippie days and the Net's era of exploration has earned him a reputation as Wild, Wild Web's true believer. Indeed, his role as a Thomas Paine for the new century is much in demand. His globe-trotting itinerary makes him a suitable candidate as perhaps the first man to be literally e-mailed into cyberspace. As the founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and fellow at Harvard Law School's Berkman Center for the Internet and Society, he is the Web's poster child for free speech and easy-going anarchy, preaching that the only law the Web needs to legislate is the Golden Rule.

"Do onto others," says Barlow, "as you want them to do onto you."

As a lyricist for the fledgling days of the Grateful Dead, a band that openly asked listeners to record and produce "bootleg" recordings, he is the copyright lawyer's ultimate vision of the Antichrist. Sure, the transnational entertainment conglomerates managed to lasso Napster is round one of the Internet rodeo, but the bucking bronco of technology, in the form of such innovations as Gnutella and Scour (despite subsequent legal problems), has already left the barn like a mercurial trickster that's impossible contain. Your only hope is launch your mind, fuse it, to the non-linear mindset made possible, with each link and click, to the mind expanding drug otherwise known as the Web.

The running theme, nowadays, Barlow says, of thought about rock'n'roll is about law, instead of how people listen to the music, and how the artist's creative Vision is expressed.

"For the first 15 years of working with the Dead, money, business and law never entered into my motivational system," he says. "The idea that I might own my work never occurred to me . . . when we did start to make money, something important was lost."

As for music, sayeth Barlow, as is so for the Web.

"We have to figure out how to gracefully remove (corporate) entities from this business, figure out that what they will do if they win: kill the music."

"We," of course, being non-corporate people, a concept that may in fact be as outmoded in this day and age as the term, "Netizen." Will this wolf survive?

Due to its "transjurisdictional nature," Barlow says, in essence, a Netizen is world citizen, not just a member of the real-world society where they originally logged into the Web. Down to the core, the digital environmentalist, or just plain tree huggers, have a certain elitist and anarchist bent. As a great many members of the digerati are likely to do, Barlow pastes random but relevant quotations from artists and literary giants at the bottom of each e-mail message. With an initial contact earlier this year, he included the following quotation by Pablo Picasso: "Every act of creation is first of all an act of destruction, because the new idea will destroy what a lot of people believe is essential to the survival of their intellectual world."

I e-mailed two more quotes from other creatives right back to him, starting with this one by Western artist Charles M. Russell, who wrote: "I have been called a pioneer. In my book a pioneer is a man who comes to virgin country, traps off all the fur, kills off all the wild meat, cuts down all the trees, grazes off all the grass, plows the roots up and strings ten million miles of wire. A pioneer destroys things and calls it civilization." The other was by the late novelist, Edward Abbey: "Wilderness is not a luxury but a necessity of the human spirit, and as vital to our lives as water and good bread."

Barlow responded rather crisply, "or, in his case, as vital as alcohol."

Both Abbey and Barlow are, in any case, witnesses crying in the wilderness about the ghost in the machine and the instructive myths that live, timelessly, on the frontiers of our mind's eye. While Barlow had the audacity to declare the New World to be a sovereign state that's completely ungovernable, Abbey declared himself as completely ungovernable by the sovereign state.

To most of the long-toothed original mountain men, the "old-timers" (anyone who used the Net prior to say the appearance of the first shopping mall in 1994), the e-commerce threats far outweigh any invasive possibilities raised by the Feds, surveillance spooks or whole brigades of hackers. "I have as much fear of industry as government, if not more," Barlow says. To this group, the birth of the World Wide Web's is as fondly romanticized as the birth of the Republic itself: those bygone days of egalitarianism, fraternity and liberty . . . served hot with an espresso at the cyber café.