NYTimes: A Crunchy-Granola Path From Macramé and LSD to Wikipedia and Google

As Fred Turner points out in his revealing new book, ‘From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism‘ (University of Chicago Press), there is no way to separate cyberculture from counterculture; indeed, cyberculture grew from its predecessor’s compost. Mr. Turner suggests that Stewart Brand, who created the ‘Whole Earth Catalog,’ was the major node in a network of countercultural speculators, promoters, inventors and entrepreneurs who helped change the world in ways quite different from those they originally envisioned.

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[Turner] suggests, we are mistaken in thinking that the postwar technological world was dominated by hierarchies and rigid categories. Under the influence of the mathematician Norbert Wiener, it became increasingly common to think of humans and machines as interacting elements of ‘cybernetic systems’ — organisms through which information flowed. This also led to a different way of thinking about living organisms and their networks of interaction.

NYTimes: A Crunchy-Granola Path From Macramé and LSD to Wikipedia and Google
As Fred Turner points out in his revealing new book, ‘From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism‘ (University of Chicago Press), there is no way to separate cyberculture from counterculture; indeed, cyberculture grew from its [...]