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, a 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. He's known them since they looked like this.
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 also works as a consultant on such matters with the Vanguard Group of CSC and the Global Business Network.
He probably the only former Republican Country Chairman in America willing to call himself a hippie mystic without lowering his voice, and though he was recently declared by the Utne Reader to be among "100 Visionaries Who Could Change Your Life," he is generally content to work on changing his own.
Finally, he recognizes that there is a difference between information and experience and he vastly prefers the latter.
He is the father of three daughters, Leah Justine, 13, Anna Winter, 10, and Amelia, 9. He was married to their mother, Elaine Parker, for 17 years before they separated in 1992. His mother, Miriam Barlow Bailey is 90 years old and ought to be declared a national monument.
He lives in Wyoming, New York, on The Road, and in Cyberspace.
He is still mourning the death of Dr. Cynthia Horner.
