He was born in Wyoming in 1947, was educated there in a one room schoolhouse, and graduated from Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut with an honors degree in comparative religion in 1969.
In 1971, he began operating the Bar Cross Land and Livestock Company, the large cow-calf operation in Cora, Wyoming where he grew up. He continued to do so until he sold it in 1988.
He has been co-writing songs with the Grateful Dead since 1971.
In 1990 he and Mitchell Kapor founded the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an organization which promotes freedom of expression in digital media. He currently serves as its Vice Chairman.
He is a writer and lecturer on subjects relating to the virtualization of society and is a contributing editor of numerous publications, including Communications of the ACM, Microtimes, and Mondo 2000. He is also a contributing writer for Wired. He is a recognized commentator on computer security, Virtual Reality, digitized intellectual property, and the social and legal conditions arising in the global network of connected digital devices.
He probably the only former Republican Country Chairman in America willing to call himself a hippie mystic without lowering his voice. He also recognizes that there is a difference between information and experience and he vastly prefers the latter.
He is the father of three daughters under 11 and lives in Wyoming, New York, and Cyberspace (where his address is barlow@eff.org).
He is currently mourning the loss of Dr. Cynthia Horner, who died on April 17, 1994, two days short of her 30th birthday.