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 often find themselves surprised that they are not in some soulless technocratic bureaucracy, but in a cultural hodgepodge—a cultural Brigadoon—of the 1960s, where the remnants of the counterculture and the politics of liberation have given birth to the modern network revolution. At the time, it all seemed dangerously anarchic (and still does to many), but the counterculture's disdain for centralized authority provided not only the philosophical basis for the leaderless Internet, but also the philosophical basis for the entire personal computer revolution.
As business historian Peter Drucker describes in his book, Marshall McLuhan: The Gutenberg Galaxy, and technical enthusiast Buckminster Fuller, we—the generation of the sixties—were inspired by "minstrels and passionate technical evangelists." We eagerly bought into the new technologies of the time, such as Fuller's geodesic domes and the psychedelic drug LSD. We learned from them, but ultimately they became dead ends. Most of us of that generation despised computers, seeing them as embodiments of central control. But a small group—later called "hackers"—embraced computers and began to transform 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 abusing Kennedy's inaugural speech. Our self-reliant ideas were partly derived from science fiction. We all read Robert Heinlein's epic novel Stranger in a Strange Land, as well as his libertarian opus The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress. Both hippies and nerds loved Heinlein's disdain for centralized authority. To this day, computer scientists and technologists are almost universally science fiction fans. For reasons I'm not clear about, 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 took other cultures away from the centralized mainframe and its primary sponsor, IBM. Levy's "hacker ethic" provided a set of clearly 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 make your life better."
No one had written these things down before; this was how hackers acted and talked as they shaped the cutting edge of computer technology.
In the 1960s and early 1970s, the first generation of hackers appeared in university computer science departments. They used a technology called time-sharing to turn mainframes into virtual personal computers, providing widespread access to computers. Then, in the late 1970s, the second generation invented and manufactured personal computers. These non-academic hackers were the core types of the counterculture—such as Steve Jobs, a long-haired hippie who dropped out of Reed College, and Steve Wozniak, an engineer at Hewlett-Packard. Before their success with Apple, these two "Steves" developed and sold "blue boxes," illegal devices for making free phone calls. Their early collaborator, Lee Felsenstein, was a New Left radical who wrote for the famous underground newspaper, the Berkeley Barb. Felsenstein designed the first portable computer, called the Osborne 1.
The college students of the 1960s, while following the slogan "Turn on, tune in, and drop out," 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 success made them unwilling to "drop out" of their countercultural values, and some of them became rich and powerful at a young age.
The third generation of revolutionaries were the software hackers of the early 1980s, who developed applications, educational programs, and entertainment software for personal computers. Mitch Kapor is a typical example. Kapor was a transcendental meditation teacher who 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 successfully lobbies 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 began to take charge. 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 around 30, and their numbers are in the tens of millions. Like the personal computer changed the 1980s, this generation of young people knows that the network will change the 1990s. And like the generations before them, they are leading the way in using 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 countercultural roots of the 1960s. It's hard to call MIT Media Lab director Nicholas Negroponte or Microsoft titan Bill Gates "hippies." Yet creativity continues to emanate from that era. The name "virtual reality"—computerized sensory immersion—comes 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-braid of long hair. 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. He is a lifelong pacifist and privacy advocate who recently declared in an interview, "I've always believed that a person's political views are inseparable from his intellectual work."
Our generation has proven 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 1960s in the new millennium.