From Counterculture to Cyberculture: The Rise of Digital Utopianism
December 1st, 2006
Fred Turner of Stanford University on “From Counterculture to Cyberculture: the Rise of Digital Utopianism.”
Download the MP3 (time: 1:28:32).
In the early 1960s, computers haunted the American 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 represented 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.
Fred Turner explores this extraordinary and ironic transformation by tracing the previously untold story of a highly influential group of San Francisco Bay–area entrepreneurs who made the connections 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.
Entry Filed under: audio,Berkman Center,Digital Identity,Education,Governance,Politics
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1. Be the Media conference |&hellip | December 2nd, 2006 at 2:13 am
[…] – I posted some highlights of the Digital Disobedience thing at Harvard tonight on my mobile blog — actually just Fred Turner, who really gets it. Actually, the Berkman Center just posted a post about Fred that includes an MP3 interview, which I’m sure is much more interesting than my one phone photo. […]
2. netzpolitik.org: » &hellip | December 2nd, 2006 at 11:36 am
[…] Bei AudioBerkman gibt es einen interessanten neuen Audio-Beitrag: “From Counterculture to Cyberculture: the Rise of Digital Utopianism”. Fred Turner of Stanford University on
3. Basement Tapes » Fr&hellip | December 2nd, 2006 at 5:32 pm
[…] MediaBerkman » Blog Archive » From Counterculture to Cyberculture: the Rise of Digital Utopianism […]
4. Myspace for freaks, Faceb&hellip | June 26th, 2007 at 1:48 pm
[…] Turner from Stanford, author of “From Counterculture to Cyberculture”. I saw him at Digital Disobedience at Harvard a few months ago, and he was one of two people who had something relevant and interesting to add to the social […]