hippies are the progenitors of internet culture? // canavarlar

internet hippies

A Crunchy-Granola Path From Macramé and LSD to Wikipedia and Google

The pages are yellowed, the addresses and phone numbers all but
useless, the products antique, the utopian expectations quaint. But
the “Whole Earth Catalog” — and particularly “The Last Whole Earth
Catalog,” published in 1971, which ended up selling a million copies and
winning the National Book Award — has the eerie luminosity of a Sears
catalog from the turn of the last century. It is a portrait of an age and its
dreams.

Deerskin jackets and potter’s wheels, geodesic domes and star charts,
instructions on raising bees and on repairing Volkswagens, advice on
building furniture and cultivating marijuana: all this can be found here,
along with celebrations of communal life and swipes at big government, big
business and a technocratic society.

Can this encyclopedia of countercultural romance have anything to do with
today’s technological world, a world of broadband connections, TCP/IP
protocol and the Internet? The Internet, after all, began during the cold
war as an attempt to create a network of computers that would be
resilient in case of nuclear attack. Its instigator, the United States
Department of Defense, was at the very center of the culture being
countered by the “Whole Earth Catalog.” How could the romantic, utopian
culture of the 1960’s, with its deep suspicions about modernity and its
machinery, be closely linked to one of the most important technological
revolutions of the last hundred years?

Yet as Fred Turner points out in his revealing new book, “From
Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network,
and the Rise of Digital Utopianism” (University of Chicago Press), there is
no way to separate cyberculture from counterculture; indeed, cyberculture
grew from its predecessor’s compost. Mr. Turner suggests that Stewart
Brand, who created the “Whole Earth Catalog,” was the major node in a
network of countercultural speculators, promoters, inventors and
entrepreneurs who helped change the world in ways quite different from
those they originally envisioned.

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www.nytimes.com/2006/09/25/arts/25conn.html