In Fred Turner's "From Counterculture to Cyberculture", Turner contrasts the perspectives of John Perry Barlow and Lee Felsenstein as the old guard of cyberneti

In Fred Turner's "From Counterculture to Cyberculture", Turner contrasts the perspectives of John Perry Barlow and Lee Felsenstein as the old guard of cybernetic counterculturalists versus Acid Phreak and Fiber optik as the new guard of modern hackers: > When they joined the discussion on the WELL, Phreak and Optik immediately set off a culture clash. The conflict could be seen clearly in the edited version of the forum eventually printed in Harper's. Like the online forum, and like it's predecessor, The Hackers' Conference of 1984, the conversation opened with a discussion of the hacker ethic. WELL regulars described the ethic in cybernetic and countercultural terms familiar to their online colleagues. Lee Felsenstein compared hackers to the "Angelheaded hipsters" of Allen Ginsberg's poem "Howl." John Perry Barlow described them as solitary inventors designing a system through which humans woule acquire the simultaneous unity of other "collective organisms." Acid Phreak would have none of it. "There is no one hacker ethic," he wrote. "Everyone has his own. To say that we all think the same way is preposterous." Among WELL regulars like Felsenstein and Barlow, hackers were cybernetic counter-culturalists, creatures devoted to establishing a new, more open culture by any electronic means necessary. For Acid Phreak, the hackers were break-in artists devoted to exploring and exploiting weaknesses in closed and especially corporate systems. I would be really interested to hear how the perspectives of the surviving participants in this conversation have evolved.