7 ms·

We Owe It All to the Hippies (1995)

76 points by daddy_drank 12y ago

justanother 12y ago
If there's one thing I enjoy from music (and music videos) from the 1980s, it is the unbounded optimism and bubbly nature. We were going to change the world, "with _science_!" And I often think of the early-to-mid 1990s Internet as a hangover of this mentality. We laughed off the Clinton Administration's Clipper chip, even as rumors abounded of the NSA peering at every NAP. We were, after all, unstoppable. We were going to change the world with science. I don't want to sound too negative, because it's never too late for a comeback, but for the moment at least, this thing has been turned against us by corporate interests and the NSA. Were I a pessimist, I'd quote Easy Rider and say, "You know, man, we blew it." That is, if I were a pessimist. I'm still pretty sure we can put this thing together like it was supposed to be.
- sehugg 12y ago
  The relevant Easy Rider quote I had in mind is: "You know, this used to be a helluva good country. I can't understand what's gone wrong with it."
  - malka 12y ago
    Well, first, you started the war on drugs. It brougth more drugs. Then you started the war on terror.Guess what the result were? You should start a war on jobs. Maybe it'll work.
    - ANTSANTS 12y ago
      >You should start a war on jobs. Maybe it'll work. Could this be the missing puzzle piece to implementing universal income???
- mwfunk 12y ago
  Looking back at media from that time, there was what looks like a quaint optimism now. But from what I remember from living in the '80s, there was also a darkness that is just not really a thing anymore. I graduated from high school in 1989, so this is biased by the fact that I was a kid or a teenager throughout the '80s, so I'm not sure to what degree this was just me. But I remember just taking the inevitability of nuclear war almost as a given. It felt like for my whole life the world was trapped in a Mexican standoff, and the inevitable result was the annihilation of all life on the planet. It's still a possibility, of course, but I just remembered spending a lot of time in the '80s thinking it was inevitable. When I remember the goofy '80s stuff, it was always in stark contrast to the apocalyptic stuff. The goofiness and bubbliness of '80s media felt like a reaction to the darkness of the reality. I don't know how much of that undertone of darkness was a shared sentiment vs. my own bias because I was a moody dramatic teenager at the time. The '80s were also the heyday of the global disaster movies, that were about the extinction of the human race. I just remember a steady stream of movies about human extinction from nuclear war, disease, climate change, comets, zombies (of course), aliens, apes, etc. People still make apocalyptic movies, of course, but it just felt like fear of extinction was more in the collective subconscious then than it is now. Or maybe that was just the kind of kid that I was? I'd be interested to hear how others experienced the same years.
  - Cowicide 12y ago
    >I remember just taking the inevitability of nuclear war almost as a given. It was damn closer than most people realize. That nutball Reagan nearly killed all of us: http://www.alternet.org/story/149821/how_reagan_brought_the_world_to_the_brink_of_nuclear_destruction http://www.alternet.org/story/149821/how_reagan_brought_the_... And, we're not out of the woods yet. If we end up with another madman Republican perhaps like McCain, we'll probably get sent over the edge with Russia since we already know that Putin is also a nut. Not to mention Russia was perhaps (arguably) on its way to launching nukes on a false alarm if it wasn't for one guy who didn't follow orders: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislav_Petrov#The_incident https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislav_Petrov#The_incident Maybe if he hadn't disobeyed orders someone else would've stopped the launch, maybe not. But, considering the incredible stakes, I think it was all just a bit too close for comfort either way. Moral of the story? Live every day like it's your last day on Earth, because someday it'll be true.
- bowlofpetunias 12y ago
  Which 80's are you talking about? What I remember is dark music, "no future" graffiti, riots, heroine junkies in the alley and the ever-present "reality" that some day soon they were gonna use the nukes and it would all be over anyway.
  - dredmorbius 12y ago
    Where was this, if I might ask? The junkies part in particular didn't seem as mainstream / widespread as it is now. Perhaps in certain areas, but it seems pretty uniform today.
    - sanoli 12y ago
      hmm... New York?
- yodsanklai 12y ago
  > We were going to change the world, "with _science_!" This is not only a hippie thing. Many conservatives have faith that global warming or pollution will be eventually solved by science.
  - Negitivefrags 12y ago
    And why cant they be? If there is a breakthrough in energy a lot of things become possible to fix with brute force approaches.
    - dredmorbius 12y ago
      "If". That's assuming a lot. Also: Leibig's law of the minimum. Plenty of other constraints waiting to hook us.
  - dasil003 12y ago
    Certainly the oil company execs whisper themselves to sleep with this each night.
- dredmorbius 12y ago
  As one who was there, I'd argue it was a time that was fairly optimistic (there's some truth to the whole John Hughes movie archetype), but not without some shades of darkness as well. Some of that's reflected in The Breakfast Club come to think of it: wealth disparities (Claire, the rich kid), blue-collar uncertainties (Andrew), future pysch case (Allison), genius (Brian), and budding criminal (John). The country had come out of Vietnam, the Oil Crises of the 1970s, Watergate, and a lot of distrust over the CIA, FBI, and COINTELPRO (some things never change). The Challenger explosion (January, 1986) and Chernobyl disaster (April, 1986) both suggested profound limits to technology. There was the threat of nuclear war, the Soviets were The Enemy (or was it Eastasia?), Japan was eating everyone's lunch, and the rustbelt was really starting to show its weaknesses. At the same time, oil (eventually) got cheap again, the economy began was was a 20 year sustained period of growth, with two minor burps (the 1989 stock market crash, and the early 1990s recession). The Berlin Wall came down and the Soviet Union fell, both almost completely unimaginable even just a few years earlier. You had your bubbly pop, but there was also the punk movement. Bands like Timbuk3 put out cynical songs like "Futures So Bright I Gotta Wear Shades": http://fixyt.com/watch?v=gRh4-czxbT0 http://fixyt.com/watch?v=gRh4-czxbT0 The uptempo performance is often mistake for optimism, the lyrics say otherwise, as Pat MacDonald clarified in an interview. From Wikipedia: Pat somewhat clarified the meaning by stating that it was, contrary to popular belief, a "grim" outlook. While not saying so directly, he hinted at the idea that the bright future was in fact due to impending nuclear holocaust. The "job waiting" after graduation signified the demand for nuclear scientists to facilitate such events. Pat drew upon the multitude of past predictions which transcend several cultures that foreshadow the world ending in the 1980s, along with the nuclear tension at the height of the cold war to compile the song. Dire Straits, "Money for Nothing" also reflected on the contrast between moving refrigerators vs. "See the little faggot with the earring and the makeup" (it was a different age) "got his own jet airplane". Probably moving into the Mission and ruining the neighborhood as well. And the computer animations were state-of-the-art. http://fixyt.com/watch?v=lAD6Obi7Cag http://fixyt.com/watch?v=lAD6Obi7Cag There was a sense of possible future problems (energy, oil, we were just starting to hear about CO2), but nothing imminent (other than nuclear annihilation). I'd say that's probably the biggest change now: the global economy has been dragging for 10-15 years now, and there's a distinct sense that the trajectory has changed.
- lkrubner 12y ago
  About naive optimism: I have a friend who lead the team at AOL, back in 1991, that built the chat client for AOL. At the time, he and his team sincerely believed that they were ending war forever, for surely, they thought, once there was an easy to use GUI chat client that allowed all the people of the world to chat, then there could never be war again.
eevilspock 12y ago
No. hippie != libertarian hippie != hipster
- ardit33 12y ago
  hippie == live and let live, fuck the man, and peace love and harmony, oh, and lots of drugs and sex, music and drum circles. Sounds like fun, until you hit real adulthood and real responsibilities.
  - deciplex 12y ago
    Nothing you listed, in moderation, precludes addressing real responsibilities as a 'real' adult.
  - coldtea 12y ago
    >Sounds like fun, until you hit real adulthood and real responsibilities. The whole idea is that it isn't something just for 20-year olds. So the "sounds like fun, until you hit real adulthood and real responsibilities" part is a total misunderstanding of the thing. What did hippie-ism in is mostly human relations and psychology (feuds, jealoushy, power plays, etc) than people reaching some imaginary "real adulthood" that prevents it, and the fact that for a lot of people it was a temporary fad. There have been very active hippies well into their forties and even seventies, and of course there have been older people, and people who spent their whole lives, in lots of similar "outsider" movements who didn't give up.
  - justatdotin 12y ago
    peace love and harmony ARE real adult resposibilities.
  - return0 12y ago
    That's an easy way to dismiss anything that would change anyone's life anywhere.
  - xj9 12y ago
    I know lots of functional, adult hippies. I can't say I'm a "real adult", exactly, because I just turned 23 a couple of weeks ago and I'm really still a young adult. Here's the thing: I'm a hippie, full-on free love, fuck the man, LSD, everything. I own a sheep-skin drum. I'm also the lead software developer at a small marketing company and I do freelance work on the side. I live with two friends who are going through some tough times and I willingly pay all of the bills, I'm like a fucking dad. Maybe you should take another look at what constitutes "real adulthood" and "real responsibilities".
theoh 12y ago
See also http://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/F/bo3773600.html http://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/F/bo3773600...
rdl 12y ago
Gen X had a lot more to do with the useful parts of the Internet, along with pre-Baby Boomer scientists, than the boomers (and thus hippies).
- dredmorbius 12y ago
  Hard to say, it's been a lot of development all the way through. Without the work of Ritchie and Thompson and Joy, et al, all Boomers, Unix wouldn't have developed as it had. Dennis Ritche was born in 1941. Richard Stallman (1953) brought about GNU and the Free Software revolution, Larry Wall (1954) Perl. The Internet (and Arpanet before it) were both built by Boomers. Linus Torvalds (1969, Gen X), Linux, Brian Behlendorf (1973, Gen X) Apache. Those two were probably responsible for more of the Linux revolution than anyone else. Google was created by Gen Xers (Page and Brin, 1973). Yes, they were creating new and useful stuff, but on a base created mostly by Boomers.
  - rdl 12y ago
    Ah -- I forgot most of the people in the early Arpanet/Internet in the 70s were grad students or otherwise fairly early-career, so they were Boomers, vs. mid/late career at the time, so Greatest or Silent Generation.
    - dredmorbius 12y ago
      Some older ones may have been in academic positions. I suspect they'd mostly have been with IBM or the big corporate computer companies (Burroughs, Sperry-Rand, Honeywell, etc.). Unix and Internet were pretty non-commercial at the time.
Animats 12y ago
Nah. The people who really made it happen weren't hippies.
arh68 12y ago
> Just as personal computers transformed the '80s, this latest generation knows that the Net is going to transform the '90s. With the same ethic that has guided previous generations, today's users are leading the way with tools created initially as "freeware" or "shareware," available to anyone who wants them. So, did that generation die? I think it died back with Justin Frankel and Shawn Fanning. 'Writing shareware' hasn't really been an acceptable job description since about then. And if that wave from '95 died, what wave are we in now? EDIT: PS I just remembered Bram Cohen's name so I'm trying to rethink the generations..
- jiggy2011 12y ago
  Open source is the new shareware I think.
- pjc50 12y ago
  Everything's been professionalised as there are far more people able to write software and far more competition. "Shareware" has been replaced with IAPs, "free to play", and advertising-supported software. Everything is now always connected; there's no advantage to distributing software by mailing out floppy disks and persuading people to hand those disks to others.
- Udo 12y ago
  The existence of shareware was mostly due to an information imbalance and difficulties in distribution. These factors went away when the internet became ubiquitous and fast. Trialware and nagware still exists, though. Today, the distribution and adoption challenge is mostly solved through open source software, so I'm guessing that people who would have been shareware authors in the 80s and 90s are simply doing open source (with commercial support, corporate sponsorship, and/or dual licensing) or are working on closed-source commercial software. For that last category, the internet has also lowered the barriers tremendously in every conceivable way. My guess is the spirit and complex motivations of software authors have not fundamentally changed but have morphed to fill a different eco system.
- wisty 12y ago
  If you want a free closed-source app with optional upgrades, have a look at your phone.
p4bl0 12y ago
I think I already said it on HN, but I really, really recommend reading "DO IT!: Scenarios of the Revolution" by Jerry Rubin. In my opinion, you can't get the right version of the history of hackers without considering the relationships between the hackers/phreakers movement and the Yippies / Freedom of Speech / Hippies movements.
return0 12y ago
It's weird how the children of those hippies are in a frantic pursuit to turn those ideas back into silo'ed, patented and monetized startups, while still claiming to be open. There lurks a deep incompatibility between the two, but still so far the system is working. Money seems to be one of the things the hippie revolution did not change, and while there is brand new technology for money, we 'll never see a "couchsurfing for money". In the end, here we are talking about it in the forums of a private startup incubator...
blueskin_ 12y ago
>communalism and libertarian politics Aren't these two things completely mutually exclusive? (NB: Obviously, being able to choose communalism or individualism as you prefer makes the two semi-compatible, but not the aforementioned as a public policy...)
- duairc 12y ago
  No, not at all. I would argue that one implies the other. Historically, and still to this day in much of Europe, the term "libertarianism" is a synonym for anarchism, i.e., libertarian communism. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarchist_communism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarchist_communism
  - blueskin_ 12y ago
    Communism itself is the opposite of individualism; a centrally planned economy doesn't need innovators, it needs Citizen 647,203 to work at his assigned job in Agricultural Collective 63 and not get thoughts above his station lest he be sent to the gulag. I'm British, and I can tell you libertarianism here does not mean anarchism (or the popular US version of 'libertarianism' either, AKA conservativism with legal cannabis). Also remember why communistic economies fail - again, it's the lack of drive to innovate. If you have a dull, tedious, mind-numbing job and you get paid (or food stamps or whatever) the same value no matter whether you work hard, innovate, and improve processes or bump along at the bottom doing the bare minimum, people are going to gravitate towards the latter. As such, technological development stagnates, processes never change even when deeply flawed, and bureaucracy becomes entrenched in defending their own jobs.
    - vidarh 12y ago
      There nothing in communism that requires a centrally planned economy. In fact, a lot of communist ideologists would insist that a centrally planned economy is fundamentally incompatible with communism, as it requires a central authority to enforce decisions and many see a central authority as incompatible with a class free society. I'm in the UK, and libertarianism here most certainly does mean anarchism to a lot of people, socialism to others, though it is probably today more commonly used about factions of Thatcherites. The word itself was first used by a French anarchist and communist, and it has a long history in Europe (150 years+) of being used about left wing organisations, and only a few decades of use about the right wing. In the UK, the use of the term date at least as far back as the 1880's, when some prominent members of the Socialist League (1885), which counted people like Engels and Eleanor Marx as it's supporters, considered themselves libertarians. > Also remember why communistic economies fail No country to my knowledge have claimed to have had a communist economy. Some have claimed to be socialist, and many socialists would disagree with that as well. Your comment seems to assume that these terms are applied to just one ideology. Meanwhile there's an old joke that if you put two Marxists in a room, you will have three different opinions about what Marxism is. And Marxism again is just one of many dozens of socialist ideologies that differ widely. Even in Marx' days, Marx and Engels devoted a substantial proportion of the Communist Manifesto not to criticise capitalism, but to criticise other socialist ideologies that they saw as ranging from hopelessly utopian, to reactionary: worse than capitalism.
normloman 12y ago
So hippies wrestled technology away from centralized control (mainframes), started their own businesses, and slowly rebuilt centralized control (the cloud). You know what I hate about hippes? How self congratulatory they are.
jonjacky 12y ago
See also the same author's (Stewart Brand) Rolling Stone article about SAIL, Xerox Parc, and ARPA -- written during the hippie era, in 1972! http://www.wheels.org/spacewar/stone/rolling_stone.html http://www.wheels.org/spacewar/stone/rolling_stone.html It has been discussed previously in HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5548719 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5548719 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1697569 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1697569

76 points by daddy_drank 12y ago

If there's one thing I enjoy from music (and music videos) from the 1980s, it is the unbounded optimism and bubbly nature. We were going to change the world, "with _science_!" And I often think of the early-to-mid 1990s Internet as a hangover of this mentality. We laughed off the Clinton Administration's Clipper chip, even as rumors abounded of the NSA peering at every NAP. We were, after all, unstoppable. We were going to change the world with science. I don't want to sound too negative, because it's never too late for a comeback, but for the moment at least, this thing has been turned against us by corporate interests and the NSA. Were I a pessimist, I'd quote Easy Rider and say, "You know, man, we blew it." That is, if I were a pessimist. I'm still pretty sure we can put this thing together like it was supposed to be.

sehugg 12y ago
The relevant Easy Rider quote I had in mind is: "You know, this used to be a helluva good country. I can't understand what's gone wrong with it."
- malka 12y ago
  Well, first, you started the war on drugs. It brougth more drugs. Then you started the war on terror.Guess what the result were? You should start a war on jobs. Maybe it'll work.
  - ANTSANTS 12y ago
    >You should start a war on jobs. Maybe it'll work. Could this be the missing puzzle piece to implementing universal income???
mwfunk 12y ago
Looking back at media from that time, there was what looks like a quaint optimism now. But from what I remember from living in the '80s, there was also a darkness that is just not really a thing anymore. I graduated from high school in 1989, so this is biased by the fact that I was a kid or a teenager throughout the '80s, so I'm not sure to what degree this was just me. But I remember just taking the inevitability of nuclear war almost as a given. It felt like for my whole life the world was trapped in a Mexican standoff, and the inevitable result was the annihilation of all life on the planet. It's still a possibility, of course, but I just remembered spending a lot of time in the '80s thinking it was inevitable. When I remember the goofy '80s stuff, it was always in stark contrast to the apocalyptic stuff. The goofiness and bubbliness of '80s media felt like a reaction to the darkness of the reality. I don't know how much of that undertone of darkness was a shared sentiment vs. my own bias because I was a moody dramatic teenager at the time. The '80s were also the heyday of the global disaster movies, that were about the extinction of the human race. I just remember a steady stream of movies about human extinction from nuclear war, disease, climate change, comets, zombies (of course), aliens, apes, etc. People still make apocalyptic movies, of course, but it just felt like fear of extinction was more in the collective subconscious then than it is now. Or maybe that was just the kind of kid that I was? I'd be interested to hear how others experienced the same years.
- Cowicide 12y ago
  >I remember just taking the inevitability of nuclear war almost as a given. It was damn closer than most people realize. That nutball Reagan nearly killed all of us: http://www.alternet.org/story/149821/how_reagan_brought_the_world_to_the_brink_of_nuclear_destruction http://www.alternet.org/story/149821/how_reagan_brought_the_... And, we're not out of the woods yet. If we end up with another madman Republican perhaps like McCain, we'll probably get sent over the edge with Russia since we already know that Putin is also a nut. Not to mention Russia was perhaps (arguably) on its way to launching nukes on a false alarm if it wasn't for one guy who didn't follow orders: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislav_Petrov#The_incident https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislav_Petrov#The_incident Maybe if he hadn't disobeyed orders someone else would've stopped the launch, maybe not. But, considering the incredible stakes, I think it was all just a bit too close for comfort either way. Moral of the story? Live every day like it's your last day on Earth, because someday it'll be true.
bowlofpetunias 12y ago
Which 80's are you talking about? What I remember is dark music, "no future" graffiti, riots, heroine junkies in the alley and the ever-present "reality" that some day soon they were gonna use the nukes and it would all be over anyway.
- dredmorbius 12y ago
  Where was this, if I might ask? The junkies part in particular didn't seem as mainstream / widespread as it is now. Perhaps in certain areas, but it seems pretty uniform today.
  - sanoli 12y ago
    hmm... New York?
yodsanklai 12y ago
> We were going to change the world, "with _science_!" This is not only a hippie thing. Many conservatives have faith that global warming or pollution will be eventually solved by science.
- Negitivefrags 12y ago
  And why cant they be? If there is a breakthrough in energy a lot of things become possible to fix with brute force approaches.
  - dredmorbius 12y ago
    "If". That's assuming a lot. Also: Leibig's law of the minimum. Plenty of other constraints waiting to hook us.
- dasil003 12y ago
  Certainly the oil company execs whisper themselves to sleep with this each night.
dredmorbius 12y ago
As one who was there, I'd argue it was a time that was fairly optimistic (there's some truth to the whole John Hughes movie archetype), but not without some shades of darkness as well. Some of that's reflected in The Breakfast Club come to think of it: wealth disparities (Claire, the rich kid), blue-collar uncertainties (Andrew), future pysch case (Allison), genius (Brian), and budding criminal (John). The country had come out of Vietnam, the Oil Crises of the 1970s, Watergate, and a lot of distrust over the CIA, FBI, and COINTELPRO (some things never change). The Challenger explosion (January, 1986) and Chernobyl disaster (April, 1986) both suggested profound limits to technology. There was the threat of nuclear war, the Soviets were The Enemy (or was it Eastasia?), Japan was eating everyone's lunch, and the rustbelt was really starting to show its weaknesses. At the same time, oil (eventually) got cheap again, the economy began was was a 20 year sustained period of growth, with two minor burps (the 1989 stock market crash, and the early 1990s recession). The Berlin Wall came down and the Soviet Union fell, both almost completely unimaginable even just a few years earlier. You had your bubbly pop, but there was also the punk movement. Bands like Timbuk3 put out cynical songs like "Futures So Bright I Gotta Wear Shades": http://fixyt.com/watch?v=gRh4-czxbT0 http://fixyt.com/watch?v=gRh4-czxbT0 The uptempo performance is often mistake for optimism, the lyrics say otherwise, as Pat MacDonald clarified in an interview. From Wikipedia: Pat somewhat clarified the meaning by stating that it was, contrary to popular belief, a "grim" outlook. While not saying so directly, he hinted at the idea that the bright future was in fact due to impending nuclear holocaust. The "job waiting" after graduation signified the demand for nuclear scientists to facilitate such events. Pat drew upon the multitude of past predictions which transcend several cultures that foreshadow the world ending in the 1980s, along with the nuclear tension at the height of the cold war to compile the song. Dire Straits, "Money for Nothing" also reflected on the contrast between moving refrigerators vs. "See the little faggot with the earring and the makeup" (it was a different age) "got his own jet airplane". Probably moving into the Mission and ruining the neighborhood as well. And the computer animations were state-of-the-art. http://fixyt.com/watch?v=lAD6Obi7Cag http://fixyt.com/watch?v=lAD6Obi7Cag There was a sense of possible future problems (energy, oil, we were just starting to hear about CO2), but nothing imminent (other than nuclear annihilation). I'd say that's probably the biggest change now: the global economy has been dragging for 10-15 years now, and there's a distinct sense that the trajectory has changed.
lkrubner 12y ago
About naive optimism: I have a friend who lead the team at AOL, back in 1991, that built the chat client for AOL. At the time, he and his team sincerely believed that they were ending war forever, for surely, they thought, once there was an easy to use GUI chat client that allowed all the people of the world to chat, then there could never be war again.

eevilspock 12y ago

No. hippie != libertarian hippie != hipster

ardit33 12y ago
hippie == live and let live, fuck the man, and peace love and harmony, oh, and lots of drugs and sex, music and drum circles. Sounds like fun, until you hit real adulthood and real responsibilities.
- deciplex 12y ago
  Nothing you listed, in moderation, precludes addressing real responsibilities as a 'real' adult.
- coldtea 12y ago
  >Sounds like fun, until you hit real adulthood and real responsibilities. The whole idea is that it isn't something just for 20-year olds. So the "sounds like fun, until you hit real adulthood and real responsibilities" part is a total misunderstanding of the thing. What did hippie-ism in is mostly human relations and psychology (feuds, jealoushy, power plays, etc) than people reaching some imaginary "real adulthood" that prevents it, and the fact that for a lot of people it was a temporary fad. There have been very active hippies well into their forties and even seventies, and of course there have been older people, and people who spent their whole lives, in lots of similar "outsider" movements who didn't give up.
- justatdotin 12y ago
  peace love and harmony ARE real adult resposibilities.
- return0 12y ago
  That's an easy way to dismiss anything that would change anyone's life anywhere.
- xj9 12y ago
  I know lots of functional, adult hippies. I can't say I'm a "real adult", exactly, because I just turned 23 a couple of weeks ago and I'm really still a young adult. Here's the thing: I'm a hippie, full-on free love, fuck the man, LSD, everything. I own a sheep-skin drum. I'm also the lead software developer at a small marketing company and I do freelance work on the side. I live with two friends who are going through some tough times and I willingly pay all of the bills, I'm like a fucking dad. Maybe you should take another look at what constitutes "real adulthood" and "real responsibilities".

theoh 12y ago

See also http://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/F/bo3773600.html http://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/F/bo3773600...

rdl 12y ago

Gen X had a lot more to do with the useful parts of the Internet, along with pre-Baby Boomer scientists, than the boomers (and thus hippies).

dredmorbius 12y ago
Hard to say, it's been a lot of development all the way through. Without the work of Ritchie and Thompson and Joy, et al, all Boomers, Unix wouldn't have developed as it had. Dennis Ritche was born in 1941. Richard Stallman (1953) brought about GNU and the Free Software revolution, Larry Wall (1954) Perl. The Internet (and Arpanet before it) were both built by Boomers. Linus Torvalds (1969, Gen X), Linux, Brian Behlendorf (1973, Gen X) Apache. Those two were probably responsible for more of the Linux revolution than anyone else. Google was created by Gen Xers (Page and Brin, 1973). Yes, they were creating new and useful stuff, but on a base created mostly by Boomers.
- rdl 12y ago
  Ah -- I forgot most of the people in the early Arpanet/Internet in the 70s were grad students or otherwise fairly early-career, so they were Boomers, vs. mid/late career at the time, so Greatest or Silent Generation.
  - dredmorbius 12y ago
    Some older ones may have been in academic positions. I suspect they'd mostly have been with IBM or the big corporate computer companies (Burroughs, Sperry-Rand, Honeywell, etc.). Unix and Internet were pretty non-commercial at the time.

Animats 12y ago

Nah. The people who really made it happen weren't hippies.

arh68 12y ago

> Just as personal computers transformed the '80s, this latest generation knows that the Net is going to transform the '90s. With the same ethic that has guided previous generations, today's users are leading the way with tools created initially as "freeware" or "shareware," available to anyone who wants them. So, did that generation die? I think it died back with Justin Frankel and Shawn Fanning. 'Writing shareware' hasn't really been an acceptable job description since about then. And if that wave from '95 died, what wave are we in now? EDIT: PS I just remembered Bram Cohen's name so I'm trying to rethink the generations..

jiggy2011 12y ago
Open source is the new shareware I think.
pjc50 12y ago
Everything's been professionalised as there are far more people able to write software and far more competition. "Shareware" has been replaced with IAPs, "free to play", and advertising-supported software. Everything is now always connected; there's no advantage to distributing software by mailing out floppy disks and persuading people to hand those disks to others.
Udo 12y ago
The existence of shareware was mostly due to an information imbalance and difficulties in distribution. These factors went away when the internet became ubiquitous and fast. Trialware and nagware still exists, though. Today, the distribution and adoption challenge is mostly solved through open source software, so I'm guessing that people who would have been shareware authors in the 80s and 90s are simply doing open source (with commercial support, corporate sponsorship, and/or dual licensing) or are working on closed-source commercial software. For that last category, the internet has also lowered the barriers tremendously in every conceivable way. My guess is the spirit and complex motivations of software authors have not fundamentally changed but have morphed to fill a different eco system.
wisty 12y ago
If you want a free closed-source app with optional upgrades, have a look at your phone.

p4bl0 12y ago

I think I already said it on HN, but I really, really recommend reading "DO IT!: Scenarios of the Revolution" by Jerry Rubin. In my opinion, you can't get the right version of the history of hackers without considering the relationships between the hackers/phreakers movement and the Yippies / Freedom of Speech / Hippies movements.

return0 12y ago

It's weird how the children of those hippies are in a frantic pursuit to turn those ideas back into silo'ed, patented and monetized startups, while still claiming to be open. There lurks a deep incompatibility between the two, but still so far the system is working. Money seems to be one of the things the hippie revolution did not change, and while there is brand new technology for money, we 'll never see a "couchsurfing for money". In the end, here we are talking about it in the forums of a private startup incubator...

blueskin_ 12y ago

>communalism and libertarian politics Aren't these two things completely mutually exclusive? (NB: Obviously, being able to choose communalism or individualism as you prefer makes the two semi-compatible, but not the aforementioned as a public policy...)

duairc 12y ago
No, not at all. I would argue that one implies the other. Historically, and still to this day in much of Europe, the term "libertarianism" is a synonym for anarchism, i.e., libertarian communism. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarchist_communism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarchist_communism
- blueskin_ 12y ago
  Communism itself is the opposite of individualism; a centrally planned economy doesn't need innovators, it needs Citizen 647,203 to work at his assigned job in Agricultural Collective 63 and not get thoughts above his station lest he be sent to the gulag. I'm British, and I can tell you libertarianism here does not mean anarchism (or the popular US version of 'libertarianism' either, AKA conservativism with legal cannabis). Also remember why communistic economies fail - again, it's the lack of drive to innovate. If you have a dull, tedious, mind-numbing job and you get paid (or food stamps or whatever) the same value no matter whether you work hard, innovate, and improve processes or bump along at the bottom doing the bare minimum, people are going to gravitate towards the latter. As such, technological development stagnates, processes never change even when deeply flawed, and bureaucracy becomes entrenched in defending their own jobs.
  - vidarh 12y ago
    There nothing in communism that requires a centrally planned economy. In fact, a lot of communist ideologists would insist that a centrally planned economy is fundamentally incompatible with communism, as it requires a central authority to enforce decisions and many see a central authority as incompatible with a class free society. I'm in the UK, and libertarianism here most certainly does mean anarchism to a lot of people, socialism to others, though it is probably today more commonly used about factions of Thatcherites. The word itself was first used by a French anarchist and communist, and it has a long history in Europe (150 years+) of being used about left wing organisations, and only a few decades of use about the right wing. In the UK, the use of the term date at least as far back as the 1880's, when some prominent members of the Socialist League (1885), which counted people like Engels and Eleanor Marx as it's supporters, considered themselves libertarians. > Also remember why communistic economies fail No country to my knowledge have claimed to have had a communist economy. Some have claimed to be socialist, and many socialists would disagree with that as well. Your comment seems to assume that these terms are applied to just one ideology. Meanwhile there's an old joke that if you put two Marxists in a room, you will have three different opinions about what Marxism is. And Marxism again is just one of many dozens of socialist ideologies that differ widely. Even in Marx' days, Marx and Engels devoted a substantial proportion of the Communist Manifesto not to criticise capitalism, but to criticise other socialist ideologies that they saw as ranging from hopelessly utopian, to reactionary: worse than capitalism.

normloman 12y ago

So hippies wrestled technology away from centralized control (mainframes), started their own businesses, and slowly rebuilt centralized control (the cloud). You know what I hate about hippes? How self congratulatory they are.

jonjacky 12y ago

See also the same author's (Stewart Brand) Rolling Stone article about SAIL, Xerox Parc, and ARPA -- written during the hippie era, in 1972! http://www.wheels.org/spacewar/stone/rolling_stone.html http://www.wheels.org/spacewar/stone/rolling_stone.html It has been discussed previously in HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5548719 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5548719 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1697569 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1697569