English language
Published Nov. 5, 2006 by University of Chicago Press.
Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the rise of digital utopianism
English language
Published Nov. 5, 2006 by University of Chicago Press.
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.