If all ideas have to be bought, then you have an intellectually regressive system that will assure you have a highly knowledgeable elite and an ignorant mass.
Interpretation
The quote critiques a system where knowledge is commodified, leading to inequality in intellectual access.
John Perry Barlow's quote warns against a society where ideas and knowledge are treated as commodities that must be purchased. This creates a fundamental divide between a knowledgeable elite who can afford to buy information and a mass of people who remain ignorant due to lack of access. The quote highlights the dangers of intellectual elitism and stresses the importance of free access to knowledge for a truly enlightened society.
In practice
This quote can be used in a discussion about education reform and the need for free access to information.
With the development of the Internet...we are in the middle of the most transforming technological event since the capture of fire. I used to think that it was just the biggest thing since Gutenberg, but now I think you have to go back farther.
The Internet treats censorship as a malfunction and routes around it.
The Internet may well disempower the nation state, but at the same time, it also strengthens certain specific state functions - like surveillance. As a political entity, it doesn't empower the nation sate. It creates the availability of much more data than the digestive system of the nation state could possibly assimilate.
Our identities have no bodies, so, unlike you, we cannot obtain order by physical coercion. We believe that from ethics, enlightened self-interest, and the commonweal, our governance will emerge.
The Internet amplifies power in all respects. It can grossly exaggerate the power of the individual.
I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.
All significant truths are private truths. As they become public they cease to become truths; they become facts, or at best, part of the public character; or at worst, catchwords.
Death is not a tragedy to the one who dies; to have wasted the life before that death, that is the tragedy.
I am quite sure, that if we open a quarrel between the past and the present, we shall find that we have lost the future.
Pour out wine till I become a wanderer from myself; for in selfhood and existence I have felt only fatigue.
He felt as though his heart were a bomb, a complicated bomb that would result in a simple explosion, wrecking the world without rocking it.
But the Good Book said a lot of things. Like 'love thy neighbor' and ' do unto others as you would have them do unto you'. If nothing else, wasn't the message of the Good Book to live and let live? So how could the Crosses call themselves 'God's chosen' and still treat us the way they did?
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