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What the Dormouse Said

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Highlights

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The civil rights, psychedelic, women’s rights, ecology, and antiwar movements all contributed to the emergence of a counterculture that rejected many of America’s cherished postwar ideals. ^ref-41906

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The computer technologies that we take for granted today owe their shape to this unruly period, which was defined by protest, experimentation with drugs, countercultural community, and a general sense of anarchic idealism. ^ref-25910

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Stewart Brand has argued in his essay “We Owe It All to the Hippies” that “the counterculture’s scorn for centralized authority provided the philosophical foundations of not only the leaderless Internet but also the entire personal-computer revolution.” ^ref-41020

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technophiles. Some espoused an antitechnology, back-to-the-land philosophy. Others believed that better tools could lead to social progress. Brand’s tool-centric worldview, epitomized by one of the decade’s most popular and influential books, the Whole Earth Catalog (1968), made the case that technology could be harnessed for more democratic and decentralized uses. The catalog ultimately helped shape the view of an entire generation, which came to believe that computing technologies could be used in the service of such goals as political revolution and safeguarding the environment. ^ref-46865

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Metadata

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