Compiled from: an article written by Stuart Brand in TIME Magazine in 1995: WE OWE IT ALL TO THE HIPPIES - Forget antiwar protests, Woodstock, even long hair. The real legacy of the sixties generation is the computer revolution
Forget antiwar protests, Woodstock, even long hair. The real legacy of the sixties generation is the computer revolution.
Newcomers to the Internet are often surprised to find themselves not in some soulless technocratic elite, but in a cultural Brigadoon - a flowering remnant of the '60s, when hippie communalism and libertarian politics formed the roots of the modern cyber-revolution. It all looked dangerous and anarchic then (and still does to many), but the counterculture's contempt for centralized authority not only provided the philosophical foundations for an Internet without leaders; it also supplied the philosophical foundations for the whole personal computer revolution.
As business historian Peter Drucker describes media guru Marshall McLuhan and technology enthusiast Buckminster Fuller, we - the generation of the '60s - were inspired by "bardic poets and passionate technophiles." We eagerly bought into the new technologies of the time, like Fuller's geodesic domes and the psychedelic drug LSD. We learned from them, but ultimately they hit dead ends. Most of our generation despised computers as embodiments of centralized control. But a small group - later called "hackers" - took to computers and began to turn them into tools of liberation. It turned out to be the real shortcut to the future.
"Don't ask what your country can do for you. Do it yourself," we said, gleefully misquoting Kennedy. Our self-reliant ethos partly came from science fiction. We all read Robert Heinlein's epic Stranger in a Strange Land and his libertarian novel The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress. Both hippies and nerds loved Heinlein's contempt for centralized authority. To this day, computer scientists and technologists are almost universally science fiction fans. For reasons I'm not clear on, science fiction has been almost universally liberal in outlook since the 1950s.
As Steven Levy documented in his 1984 book Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution, there were three generations of young computer programmers who deliberately wrested computing from the centralized mainframe establishment and its major sponsor, IBM. Levy laid out the "hacker ethic," a set of countercultural principles. Among them:
"Access to computers should be unlimited and total."
"All information should be free."
"Mistrust authority - promote decentralization."
"You can create art and beauty on a computer."
"Computers can make your life better."
Nobody had written these things down before; this was how hackers acted and talked as they shaped the frontiers of computer technology.
In the '60s and early '70s, the first generation of hackers appeared in university computer science departments. They used a technique called time-sharing to turn mainframes into virtual personal computers, providing broad access to computers. Then, in the late '70s, the second generation invented and built personal computers. These nonacademic hackers were the core types of the counterculture - like Steve Jobs, the long-haired hippie college dropout, and Steve Wozniak, the Hewlett-Packard engineer. Before their success with Apple, the two Steves developed and sold "blue boxes," illegal devices for making free phone calls. Their early collaborator Lee Felsenstein, a New Left radical who wrote for the famous underground paper the Berkeley Barb, designed the first portable computer, the Osborne 1.
College students of the '60s, following the slogan "Turn on, tune in and drop out," also dropped the academic disdain for business. "Do your own thing" easily translated into "start your own business." Finding ready refuge in the small-business world, where they brought sincerity and a sense of mission, hippies were attractive to suppliers and customers alike. Their business success made them unwilling to "drop out" of their countercultural values, and some of them became rich and powerful while still young.
The third generation of revolutionaries were the software hackers of the early '80s, who developed applications, educational and entertainment programs for personal computers. Mitch Kapor is a typical example. A former transcendental meditation teacher, Kapor gave us the spreadsheet program Lotus 1-2-3, which ensured the success of IBM's imitation of Apple's personal computer. Like most computer pioneers, Kapor remains active. His Electronic Frontier Foundation lobbies successfully in Washington for citizens' rights in cyberspace. The foundation was co-founded by him and a lyricist for the Grateful Dead.
In the years following the publication of Levy's book, the fourth generation of revolutionaries took over. Thousands of network users created countless computer bulletin boards and a distributed linking system called Usenet, all while adhering to the hacker ethic. At the same time, they turned the Defense Department-funded Arpanet into the global digital phenomenon - the Internet. Today, the average age of Internet users is about 30, and their numbers are in the tens of millions. Like the personal computer changed the '80s, this generation of young people knows that the network will change the '90s. And like the generations before them, they are using tools originally created as "free software" or "shareware" and available to anyone who wants them.
Of course, not everyone on the electronic frontier identifies with the countercultural roots of the '60s. It's hard to call the director of MIT's Media Lab, Nicholas Negroponte, or Microsoft titan Bill Gates "hippies." But the creativity continues to flow from that period. The name virtual reality - computerized sensory immersion - comes mainly from Jaron Lanier, who grew up in a geodesic dome in New Mexico, played the clarinet in the New York subway and still sports half a head of long hair. The latest generation of supercomputers, using massively parallel processing, was invented, developed and built by Danny Hillis, a gentle, long-haired hippie who is "building a machine we can be proud of." Public-key encryption, which ensures privacy for anyone, was the brainchild of Whitfield Diffie, a lifelong pacifist and privacy advocate who recently said in an interview, "I've always believed that a person's political views and his intellectual work are inseparable."
Our generation has shown in cyberspace that where self-reliance leads, resilience follows, and where generosity leads, prosperity follows. If this trend continues, and everything so far indicates that it will, the information age will bear the distinct imprint of the counterculture of the '60s well into the new millennium.