From Counterculture to Cyberculture From Counterculture to Cyberculture

From Counterculture to Cyberculture

Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism

    • $33.99
    • $33.99

Publisher Description

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.

GENRE
Non-Fiction
RELEASED
2010
15 October
LANGUAGE
EN
English
LENGTH
354
Pages
PUBLISHER
University of Chicago Press
SELLER
Chicago Distribution Center
SIZE
14.9
MB

More Books Like This

Anthro-Vision Anthro-Vision
2021
Digital Vertigo Digital Vertigo
2012
Culture as Weapon Culture as Weapon
2017
Life: The Movie Life: The Movie
1998
Race After Technology Race After Technology
2019
Reassembling the Social Reassembling the Social
2007

More Books by Fred Turner

The Democratic Surround The Democratic Surround
2013
Aux sources de l'utopie numérique Aux sources de l'utopie numérique
2021
Seeing Silicon Valley Seeing Silicon Valley
2021
Escape from Zion Escape from Zion
2008

Customers Also Bought