EAN: 9780226817422

FROM COUNTERCULTURE TO CYBERCULTURE - FRED TURN...

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. From Counterculture to Cyberculture is the first book to
explore this extraordinary and ironic transformation. Fred Turner here traces the previously
untold story of a highly influential group of San Francisco Bay-area entrepreneurs: Stewart
Brand and the Whole Earth network. Between 1968 and 1998  via such familiar venues as the
National Book Award-winning Whole Earth Catalog  the computer conferencing system known as WELL
and  ultimately  the launch of the wildly successful Wired magazine  Brand and his colleagues
brokered a long-running collaboration between San Francisco flower power and the emerging
technological hub of Silicon Valley. Thanks to their vision  counterculturalists and
technologists alike joined together to reimagine computers as tools for personal liberation 
the building of virtual and decidedly alternative communities  and the exploration of bold new
social frontiers. Shedding new light on how our networked culture came to be  this fascinating
book reminds us that the distance between the Grateful Dead and Google  between Ken Kesey and
the computer itself  is not as great as we might think.

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