His public image has been degraded from toe-jam eating and supposedly outrageous riders for speaking engagements (which I think everything in was pretty level headed but some people think it was 'nuts')
TIL I learned "GNU" is somehow pronounced with one syllable ("gnew") and not two ("guh-noo"). (I know lowercase "gnu" is pronounced with one syllable.)
It starts out reasonable, but then has gems like "please buy bus tickets only with cash under a fake name", "find me a parrot", "go to the hotel and figure out if their phone jacks do dial-up because that's most likely the only thing that will work with my machine".
The latter may have adjusted with the times, since the document is old; but then again, the demands he places on streaming technology etc. are perfectly reasonable nowadays, but a massive obstacle back then.
This is because he's actively against surveillance. It's not a hard requirement, I've lent him an anonymous (i.e. pre-paid) public transport card before, and while he didn't like the requirement to both check on and check off, he did it anyway.
> find me a parrot
That's a misrepresentation. It's a "it'd be nice if" type thing. There's also the "don't buy one" comment, because you can be sure someone has done that.
> go to the hotel and figure out if their phone jacks do dial-up because that's most likely the only thing that will work with my machine
That might be really old, his machine definitely has wifi. And if the request is from the pre-wifi with free software drivers days, it's completely reasonable for someone who lives a chunk of their life on the internet to request internet access.
It's much, much more reasonable than you're making out, especially if you consider it in the context of why you're probably asking him to speak at some event.
That's exactly what protesters did in Honk Kong in 2019 to avoid retaliation from China
So he was right, again