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Source: An article written by Stewart 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 technical bureaucracy, but in a cultural bazaar—a 60s-style cultural bazaar where the prosperity of the 60s, hippie communalism, and liberal politics form the roots of the modern cyber-revolution. It all looked dangerous and anarchistic then (and still does to many), but the counterculture's contempt for centralized authority not only provided the philosophical foundations for the leaderless internet, but also for the entire personal computer revolution.
As business historian Peter Drucker describes, we of the 60s generation were inspired by "the troubadours and the enthusiastic technologists." We eagerly bought into the new technologies of the time, such as Buckminster Fuller's geodesic domes and LSD. We learned from them, but eventually they became dead ends. Most of us of that generation despised computers as embodiments of centralized control. But a small group—later called "hackers"—embraced computers and began to turn them into tools of liberation. It turned out to be a real shortcut to the future.
"Don't ask what your country can do for you. Do it yourself," we said, gleefully misquoting Kennedy. Our do-it-yourself ethic was partly inspired by science fiction. We all read Robert Heinlein's epic Stranger in a Strange Land and his libertarian opus 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 some reason since the 1950s, science fiction has been almost universally liberal in outlook.
As Steven Levy records in his 1984 book Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution, there were three generations of young computer programmers who deliberately took the culture away from the centralized mainframe and its main sponsor, IBM. Levy's "hacker ethic" laid out a clear set of countercultural principles. Among them:
"Access to computers—and anything which might teach you something about the way the world works—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 change your life for the 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 1960s 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 widespread access to computers. Then in the late 70s, the second generation invented and built personal computers. These non-academic hackers were the core types of the counterculture—like Steve Jobs, a long-haired hippie college dropout, and Steve Wozniak, an engineer at HP. 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 newspaper the Berkeley Barb, designed the first portable computer, the Osborne 1.
As the 60s college students followed the slogan "Turn on, tune in and drop out," they also rejected academia's traditional disdain for business. "Do your own thing" was easily translated into "start your own business." Finding ready refuge in the small business world, where they were attractive to suppliers and customers alike, the hippies brought sincerity and a sense of dedication. Their business successes made them unwilling to "drop out" of their countercultural values, and some of them became rich and powerful in their youth.
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. Kapor, a former transcendental meditation teacher, 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. While adhering to the hacker ethic, thousands of network users created countless computer bulletin boards and a distributed linking system called Usenet. At the same time, they turned the Defense Department-funded ARPAnet into a 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 previous generations, they are the first to use tools originally created as "free software" or "shareware" that anyone who wants can use.
Of course, not everyone on the electronic frontier identifies with the counterculture roots of the 60s. It's hard to call MIT Media Lab director Nicholas Negroponte or Microsoft titan Bill Gates "hippies." Yet creativity continues to flow from that era. Virtual reality—the computerized sensation of being somewhere else—derives its name largely from Jaron Lanier, who grew up in a geodesic dome in New Mexico, played the clarinet in the New York subway, and still sports a half-ponytail. The latest generation of supercomputers, utilizing massive 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 declared in an interview, "I've always believed that a person's political views and his intellectual work are inseparable."
We of this generation in cyberspace have demonstrated 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 a distinct imprint of the counterculture of the 60s into the new millennium.