Escape Velocity Read Online Free PDF Page B

solution to every human problem. It only took the great psychedelic crusade to perfect the absurdity of proclaiming that personal salvation and the social revolution can be packed into a capsule.'^

    The archetypal hippie experience was not dancing naked in a field of daisies, but tripping at an acid rock concert. The psychedelic sound-and-light show was as much a technological as a Dionysian rite, from the feedback-drenched electric soundtrack to the signature visual effects (created with film, slides, strobes, and overhead projectors) to the LSD that switched on the whole experience.
    The emergent computer culture of the sixties overlapped, even then, with the counterculture. "Students were signing up in droves to take courses in computer studies," report the authors of The '60s Reader, "though having a home computer was beyond the wildest imaginings of most of them."^^ Prophetically, one of Ken Kesey's ragtag hippie troupe the Merry Pranksters was a not so distant relative of Sterling's bohemian techie-a computer programmer named Paul Foster whose life "seemed to alternate between good straight computer programming," when he wore the standard-issue suit and tie, and wilder times with the Pranksters, during which he sported a homemade psychedelic jacket festooned with "ribbons and slogan buttons and reflectors and Crackerjack favors."'^
    Similarly, the electrical engineer and hardware hacker Lee Felsen-stein "balanced the seemingly incompatible existences of a political activist and a socially reclusive engineer," writes Steven Levy in Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolutions^ Swept up in the political radicalism of the Berkeley-based free speech movement but obsessed with electronics at a time when technology was regarded with deep suspicion by radicals, Felsenstein strove to reconcile his divided loyalties. He and another activist hacker, Efrem Lipkin, went on to create the Bay Area electronic bulletin board Community Memory in 1973. Dedicated to the proposition that alternative networking was inherently empowering. Computer Memory was free to any and all through two public access terminals. "By opening a hands-on computer facility to let people reach each other, a living metaphor would be created," writes Levy, "a testament to the way computer technology could be used as guerrilla warfare for people against bureaucracies."'^
    Felsenstein and Lipkin weren't the only members of the counterculture to champion personal computing as an engine of social change. Bob Albrecht, a longhaired, wild-eyed zealot with a background in computing, founded a newspaper and a computer center, both called the Peoples' Computer Company. The technovisionary Ted Nelson self-published a

    "counterculture computer book" titled Computer Lib, an impassioned manifesto for an imagined movement whose battle cry would be "computer POWER TO THE people!" Intriguingly, Roszak recently countered Newt Gingrich's use of the term "countercultural" to demonize boomer Democrats with the charge that Gingrich is
    more beholden to the '60s than he may know. It was guerrilla computer hackers, whose origins can be discerned in the old Whole Earth Catalogue, who invented the personal computer as a means, so they hoped, of fostering dissent and questioning authority. Ironically, this is the same technology on which Mr. Gingrich, the "conservative futurist," is banking to rebuild the economy.^°
    Whole Earth Catalogue founder Stewart Brand, who put the hacker subculture on the map with his 1972 Rolling Stone article, "Frantic Life and Symbolic Death among the Computer Bums," has straddled fringe computer culture and the counterculture almost since their inception. "It's all connected," he says. "It's certainly true that psychedelic research, on back to Aldous Huxley in Los Angeles, is very much a Californian phenomenon, as is the personal computer revolution, which is probably reflective of the frontier status of the American West Coast. The early hackers of the