From Counterculture to Cyber Culture

In the early 1960s, computers haunted the American imagination. Bleak tools of the cold war, they embodied the rigid organization and mechanical conformity that made the military industrial complex possible. But by the 1990s—and the dawn of the Internet—computers represented a very different kind of world: a collaborative and digital utopia modeled on the communal ideals of the hippies who so vehemently rebelled against the cold war establishment in the first place.

Fred Turner joined us for a lunch at Berkman to explore this extraordinary and ironic transformation.  He shared the previously untold story of a highly influential group of San Francisco Bay–area entrepreneurs who made the connections between San Francisco "flower power" and the emerging technological hub of Silicon Valley.