Wise Ch. 2: The Computer Counter Culture

Chapter 2 is a treatise on the synthesis of the values of the 1960’s counterculture movement, the technology boom of Silicon Valley, the emergence of Cyberpunk’s ideas of hyperreality/virtual reality and the notions of free information and free technology that has yielded open-source software and immediate accessibility to information. The chapter illuminates the ways in which the do-it-yourself, liberative philosophy of the 1960’s Bay Area “hippies” fed the growth of new information technologies as they changed throughout the late 20th century, adopting new notions of freedom, information and education.