Computing and the Counter-Culture

The following excerpt from Walter Isaacson’s book “Steve Jobs” is crucial. Without reading this page from history, we would never have read the poem “All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace” and perhaps never begun our Machine World series. Isaacson wrote:

“In San Francisco and the Santa Clara Valley during the late 1960s, various cultural currents flowed together. There was the technology revolution that began with the growth of military contractors and soon included electronics firms, microchip makers, video game designers, and computer companies. There was a hacker subculture—filled with Wireheads, phreakers, cyberpunks, hobbyists, and just plain geeks—— that included engineers who didn’t conform to the HP mold and their kids who weren’t attuned to the wavelengths of the subdivisions. There were quasi-academic groups doing studies on the effects of LSD; participants included Doug Engelbart of the Augmentation Research center in Palo Alto, who later helped develop the computer mouse and graphical user interfaces, and Ken Kesey, who celebrated the drug with music-and-light shows featuring a house band that became the Grateful Dead. There was the hippie movement, born out of the Bay Area’s beat generation, and the rebellious political activists, born out of the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley. Overlaid on it all were various self-fulfillment movements pursuing paths to personal enlightenment: zen and Hinduism, meditation, and yoga, primal scream and sensory deprivation, Esalen and est.

This fusion of flower power and processor power, enlightenment and technology, was embodied by Steve Jobs as he meditated in the mornings, audited physics classes at Stanford, worked nights at Atari, and dreamed of starting his own business. ‘There was just something going on here,’ he said, looking back at the time and place. ‘The best music came from here—the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, Joan Baez, Janis Joplin—and so did the integrated circuit, and things like the Whole earth Catalog.’

Initially the technologists and the hippies did not interface well. Many in the counterculture saw computers as ominous and Orwellian, the province of the Pentagon and the power structure. In the Myth of the Machine, the historian Lewis Mumford warned that computers were sucking away our freedom and destroying “life-enhancing values.” An injunction on punch cards of the period—~’Do not fold, spindle or mutilate’–became an ironic phrase of the anti war left.

But by the early 1970s a shift was under way. ‘Computing went from being dismissed as a tool of bureaucratic control to being embraced as a symbol of individual expression and liberation,’ John Markoff wrote in hid study of the counterculture’s convergence with the merchants of the computer industry, What the Dormouse Said. It was an ethos lyrically expressed in Richard Brautigan’s 1967 poem, All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace, and the cyberdelic fusion was certified when Timothy Leary declared that personal computers had become the new LSD and years later revised his famous mantra to proclaim, ‘turn on boot up jack in.’ The musician Bono, who later became a friend of Jobs, often discussed with him why those interested in the rock drugs rebel counterculture of the bay area ended up helping to create the personal computer industry. ‘The people who invested the twenty-first century were pot-smoking, sandal-wearing hippies from the West Coast like Steve, because they saw differently,’ he said. ‘The hierarchical systems of the East Coast, England, German, and Japan do not encourage this different thinking. The sixties produced an anarchic mind-set that is great for imagining a world not yet in existence.'”

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In case you haven’t seen it already, please check out our first Machine World post as it was inspired by Isaacson’s fascinating history lesson.