California inspired: from flower power to Silicon Valley. How 1960s Bay Area radicalism helped shape the technological powerhouse of northern California.
>Gage first arrived at UC Berkeley as a maths student in 1960, becoming involved in the Free Speech Movement and towards the end of the decade in George McGovern’s presidential campaign against Richard Nixon. It wasn’t until 1975 that he completed his bachelor’s degree at Berkeley. At the university he became friends with Joy. [...]
>Brand argued in his essay ‘We Owe It All to the Hippies’: “The counterculture’s scorn for centralised authority provided the philosophical foundations of not only the leaderless internet, but also the entire personal-computer revolution.”
WE OWE IT ALL TO THE HIPPIES. Stewart Brand.
Forget antiwar protests, Woodstock, even long hair.
The real legacy of the sixties generation is the computer revolution.
>The third generation of revolutionaries, the software hackers of the early '80s, created the application, education and entertainment programs for personal computers. Typical was Mitch Kapor, a former transcendental-meditation teacher, who gave us the spreadsheet program Lotus 1-2-3, which ensured the success of IBM's Apple-imitating PC. Like most computer pioneers, Kapor is still active. His Electronic Frontier Foundation, which he co-founded with a lyricist for the Grateful Dead [John Perry Barlow], lobbies successfully in Washington for civil rights in cyberspace.