In the mid-1980s, John Perry Barlow tried to follow his father into the Wyoming state senate, losing the election by one vote. But Barlow—cofounder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and “junior lyricist” for the Grateful Dead—became a statesman anyway, if such a term can be applied to the borderless territory he made his home.

When Barlow died in February at age 70, remembrances came from United States senators and exiled dissidents, hackers and psychedelics enthusiasts, Harvard fellows and members of the Grateful Dead. Founding WIRED executive editor Kevin Kelly called him “the mayor of the internet.” Edward Snowden’s eulogy suggested that Barlow may have provided the seed of his own radicalization.

Mother American Night, a newly published posthumous memoir cowritten with Robert Greenfield, tells of Barlow’s journey from rural, Mormon Wyoming to the virtual domain that he was—in 1990—the first to call cyberspace, after the term from William Gibson’s Neuromancer. As Barlow surely would have noted, the scope of those remembering him demonstrated exactly the sentiment he was trying to express: The emerging internet was—and is—a place.

From this observation materialized Barlow’s career as one of the network’s most eloquent theorizers. If not an architect of the internet in the technical sense, Barlow’s gonzo dispatches—most especially 1996’s “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace”—began to imagine and articulate unfolding new dimensions of politics, economics, privacy, and public commons. Though his lyrics for the Grateful Dead will surely survive as long as there is an internet, his legacy as a cyber theorist is inevitably more complicated, and well worth consideration.

Breezy, connected by ceaselessly mind-blowing anecdotes, and bubbling over with psychedelic wisdom, Mother American Night will become the crucial document for understanding the life and work of the internet pioneer and Dead collaborator. The fun is infectious. He’s introducing Timothy Leary to the Grateful Dead! He’s working in Andy Warhol’s Factory! He’s taking acid with JFK Jr. and Daryl Hannah! He’s roasting Steve Jobs! He’s dating Anita Hill! It would be name-dropping if Barlow himself weren’t so fascinating and his observations so incisive.

“Steve [Jobs] made you care about what he thought of you, and even though you could pretend that you didn’t, you were kidding yourself,” Barlow writes. “It was a quality [Jerry] Garcia had as well,” Barlow muses, perhaps the only person on the planet qualified to draw those comparisons from personal experience. It was a life lived at scale.

Amid all the celebrity hobnobbing, Mother American Night remains resiliently idea-filled. A Wyoming cattle rancher, Barlow recalls his thrill at discovering the internet for the first time. “I had spent 15 years riding around the [ranch] thinking about [Teilhard de Chardin’s concept of a consciousness-created] noosphere, and suddenly after all that time, I had evidence this was not just Teilhard’s pipe dream but was in fact real and growing its own nervous system.”

“Find the others,” Barlow’s one-time guru Timothy Leary had instructed, those untapped minds already part of the same cause, consciously or not. When Barlow set out to do that on the unsettled electronic horizon, he perhaps didn’t realize that he was about to find all the others, give or take those who might stay off the grid altogether (and he might run into them at Dead shows anyway). Even as the internet transformed the analog world that Barlow called meatspace, cyberspace would remain a virtual domain of its own, growing at least as big as the world that spawned it, and definitely stranger.

A lifelong storyteller and self-mythologizer, Barlow was also a natural-born politician. But the specifics of those politics continue to remain singular and often undefinable. Running on charisma as much as policy, but with seemingly equal grasp of both, Barlow was perhaps less an influencer than an instigator. With an instinct for freedom honed as much on the psychedelic planes as the Wyoming frontier, Barlow’s personality rings big and weird throughout Mother American Night, as open-hearted as it was sometimes privileged.