From counterculture to cyberculture
by Fred Turner · first published 2006
64% recommend36% neutral
Why HN recommends it
Traces how Stewart Brand and the Whole Earth network shaped the link between 1960s counterculture and early digital utopianism; recommended for readers curious about the origins of computer culture and its social ideas.
Summarised by Claude from recommending comments
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.
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…curious I recommend the following books: # What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry / John Markoff. A great book with many fascinating characters. # From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism / Fred Turner. Also an interesting read, but much less accessible than Markoff’s book. # The Cuckoo’s Egg: Tracking a Spy Through…
on “Interview: Larry Wall” ↗If you want to read further, Fred Turner later published a book. (From Counterculture to Cyberculture https://g.co/kgs/Vrwazt) I remember this book fondly, I was really into social sciences At highschool, but I decided to study Electronics and this was the book that really tied both topics. It's been…
on “The Whole Earth Catalog, Where Counterculture Met Cyberculture” ↗For anyone interested in exploring this history in depth, I can warmly recommend Fred Turner’s book From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism. Very interesting stuff.
on “Ask HN: Why do I see LSD related news often in HN?” ↗…adopted it as it was the lingua franca of the research community and it seemed to walk a fine line between mainframe corporations and PC tinkerers. For more on this topic look into Fred Turner's book 'From Counterculture to Cyberculture'.
on “If software companies ran the country (1987)” ↗Books: What the Doorknob Said, by John Markoff. From Counterculture to Cyberculture, by Fred Turner.
on “Ask HN: Computers and counterculture” ↗Lots of good recommendations in this thread. Here’s some more: • Turner, Fred (2006) From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism • Slatalla, Michelle & Quittner, Joshua (1995) Masters of Deception: The Gang That Ruled Cyberspace • Schlender, Brent & Tetzeli,…
on “Ask HN: Computer Science/History Books?” ↗…to be expensive because it's so valuable". Kevin Kelly as an early collaborator of Brand of course knows this intimately. There is a wonderful and very insightful book on Brand, by the way, called "From Counterculture to Cyberculture" by Fred Turner. [1] [1] https://fredturner.stanford.edu/books/from-counterculture-to...
on “Ideas Want to Be Shared” ↗…copy of "New Rules for the New Economy" by Kevin Kelly, signed as part of the Global Business Network that he and Steward Brand founded a long time ago. Having read Fred Turner's immensely great book "From Counterculture to Cyberculture", that is a valuable little piece of history to me.
on “Discarded delights: The joy of ex-library books (2021)” ↗If anyone's interested in this: "From Counterculture to Cyberculture" by Fred Turner and "What the Dormouse Said" by John Markoff. It's sad how far we've strayed from that.
on “We All Depend on Open Source. We Will Defend It Together” ↗I also strongly recommend you to read From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network and the Rise of Digital Utopianism by Fred Turner [0] together with What the Dormouse Said. The two books are really an eye-opener and revealed how everything connected…
on “Terry Pratchett warns Bill Gates about fake news (1995)” ↗See: Fred Turner (2006), From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism. http://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/F/bo3773600...
on “Silicon Valley’s Technolibertarian Dream Was Invented By Timothy Leary” ↗…Extant histories of the internet favor either heroic or deterministic narratives. On the determinist side, we have Paul Edwards’s The Closed World (1996), Fred Turner’s Democratic Surround (2013) and From Counterculture to Cyberculture (2006), John Markoff’s What the Dormouse Said (2006), and others that describe the internet as the result of collisions between large-scale Cold War policies or zeitgeists. With some variations, these…
on “Counter-Histories of the Internet” ↗In Fred Turner's "From Counterculture to Cyberculture", Turner contrasts the perspectives of John Perry Barlow and Lee Felsenstein as the old guard of cybernetic counterculturalists versus Acid Phreak and Fiber optik as the new guard of modern hackers: >…
on “Is Computer Hacking a Crime (1989) [pdf]” ↗I've had this book on my reading list for a while! Out of Control is referenced heavily in Fred Turner's From Counterculture to Cyberculture.
on “Out of Control (1994)” ↗…Ideology’. Science as Culture 6, no. 1 (1996): 44–72. 2) Harvey, David. Spaces of Neoliberalization: Towards a Theory of Uneven Geographical Development. Franz Steiner Verlag, 2005. 3) Turner, Fred. From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism. University of Chicago Press, 2006. 4) Mirowski, Philip. Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste: How Neoliberalism Survived…
on “The Intolerable Hypocrisy of Cyberlibertarianism” ↗