“I’d rather pump septic tanks,” John Perry Barlow told me in a Chinese restaurant in 1995 to explain how much he hated writing. “You can never tell whether you did any good or not.”

We were all attending a nearby Computers, Freedom and Privacy conference. Barlow was then hashing out the beginnings of A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, which he conceived as a modern-day equivalent to Thomas Paine’s Common Sense. Many at the time thought the piece overwrought; faced with the criticism, Barlow would laugh and say his friend Mitch Kapor thought he needed a “hyperbolectomy”.

Yet 20 years later, he still stood by his words. Hyperbolic or not, Barlow’s superbly quotable 1990s writings on the internet’s disruption – on hacking and copyright among many others – inspired thousands of us to follow his lead and advocate a free, open and democratic internet.