From counterculture to cyberculture
In the early 1960s, computers haunted the American popular imagination. Bleak tools of the cold war, they embodied the rigid organization and mechanical conformity that made the military-industrial complex possible. But by the 1990s—and the dawn of the Internet—computers started to represent a very different kind of world: a collaborative and digital utopia modeled on the communal ideals of the hippies who so vehemently rebelled against the cold war establishment in the first place.
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- If anyone's interested in this: "From Counterculture to Cyberculture" by Fred Turner and "What the Dormouse Said" by John Markoff.
Putting my nostalgia-tinted glasses on, it's sad how far we've strayed from that.
- And sometimes you find little gems, too!
I have a copy of "New Rules for the New Economy" by Kevin Kelly, signed as part of the Global Business Network that he and Steward Brand founded a long time ago.
Having read Fred Turner's immensely great book "From Counterculture to Cyberculture", that is a valuable little piece of history to me.
- Just as a comment for anyone new enough to not remember the historical background:
The title is alluding to the famous quote "information wants to be free" by Steward Brand. The full quote famously includes the opposite as well, because information "wants to be expensive because it's so valuable".
Kevin Kelly as an early collaborator of Brand of course knows this intimately.
There is a wonderful and very insightful book on Brand, by the way, called "From Counterculture to Cyberculture" by Fred Turner. [1]
[1] https://fredturner.stanford.edu/books/from-counterculture-to...
- > Another failure was not grasping the services-based model
They've experienced the first services-based model by the IBM et al. in the 60s and ran away from that by looking into alternative computing. That's where the personal computing came in. Unix was tangential to the problem not until free software (GNU) adopted it as it was the lingua franca of the research community and it seemed to walk a fine line between mainframe corporations and PC tinkerers. For more on this topic look into Fred Turner's book 'From Counterculture to Cyberculture'.
- If you want to read further, Fred Turner later published a book. (From Counterculture to Cyberculture https://g.co/kgs/Vrwazt)
I remember this book fondly, I was really into social sciences At highschool, but I decided to study Electronics and this was the book that really tied both topics. It's been eight years since and I'm still in engineering but on my free time read about history.
- For anyone interested in exploring this history in depth, I can warmly recommend Fred Turner’s book From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism. Very interesting stuff.
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