# Prompt
This has no publication date. Use every resource at your disposal to determine when it was written. No conjecture.

https://www.eff.org/pages/leaving-physical-world

# Reply

I have the page but the meta dates (Feb 9, 2018) reflect EFF's posthumous archiving after Barlow's death (Feb 7, 2018), not when the speech itself was written. Let me look for internal clues and the conference date.Key evidence: at the March 1994 HyperNetwork Conference, MPT's Yoshiyuuki Takeda called it "third conference we've held," and IHNS President Kumon said "Two years ago was when we started our efforts related to hypernetworking." That places the first conference in 1992. Let me see if I can confirm Barlow's attendance and a specific date.Very helpful. Rheingold says "Barlow, Johansen, and Johnson-Lenz were invited to join me there in 1993," but that's an account written later. Let me check archived versions for an older copy with a date.Rheingold says "Two years later, I was invited back, along with John Barlow..." — meaning he returned to the second conference in 1992 (with Barlow). Let me try to pin down the month.I have enough to answer confidently. Let me also quickly check the Internet host count for cross-verification of the 1992 dating.I have enough evidence to give a confident answer with appropriate uncertainty.

## Most likely written: spring/early-to-mid 1992

The piece is the text of an address Barlow gave to the **2nd HyperNetwork Conference at Beppu Bay, Oita, Japan**, which was held in 1992. EFF's current page shows a meta `published_time` of 2018-02-09, but that's just when EFF posted the piece to its Drupal site as part of the Barlow Library after his death on Feb 7, 2018. The text itself is much older.

### What the text itself dates to

Three internal anchors line up tightly on 1992:

- **EFF's age.** Barlow writes that EFF, "after almost two years of operation," now thinks of itself as building "the united Mind of Humanity." EFF was founded July 10, 1990, so "almost two years" puts the writing at roughly spring/early summer 1992.
- **"Last summer's coup in the Soviet Union."** The August 1991 Moscow coup. Read naturally, "last summer" was written sometime between fall 1991 and the end of summer 1992.
- **Internet size.** Barlow says the Internet "connects some 800,000 (mostly UNIX) computers." Per RFC 1296, the host count was 727,000 in January 1992 and reached ~992,000 by July 1992. 800,000 sits squarely in spring 1992.

He also doesn't mention Mosaic, which launched in January 1993 — by 1993 it was almost a reflex in Barlow's writing — which is weak supporting evidence that this predates that release.

### What external sources confirm

- Howard Rheingold's *The Virtual Community* (1993), chapter 7, says he was first invited to Oita in spring 1990, and then "Two years later, I was invited back, along with John Barlow, Robert Johansen, and Peter and Trudy Johnson-Lenz." Two years after spring 1990 = 1992. (Elsewhere in the same chapter Rheingold writes "in 1993," which conflicts with his own "two years later" — I'm flagging this rather than ignoring it.)
- A first-person account by a longtime COARA member ("Mie") states that the Beppu Bay Conference's first session was March 1990 and that she joined "from the second meeting in 1992."
- A March 1994 trip report by Max Morris (Fujitsu/MIT, distributed on Dave Farber's IP list) describes the March 3–4, 1994 conference and notes it as the *third* in the series, with Prof. Kumon saying "Two years ago was when we started our efforts related to hypernetworking." Sequence: 1990, 1992, 1994.

### What I don't know

- The exact month and day. I couldn't find a primary source giving the dates of the 1992 conference (later ones in the series fell in February or March, but I have no first-hand confirmation for 1992 specifically).
- Whether the address was delivered live, prepared as a paper, or both — and thus exactly when in 1992 Barlow wrote it. The internal Internet-host figure (~800K) suggests spring 1992 if Barlow was using a current number, but he may have been working from a slightly older figure.

So: **1992, very probably spring**, written for the 2nd HyperNetwork (Beppu Bay) Conference in Oita. I'd resist any narrower claim than that without finding a primary source on the 1992 conference dates.