Now that's something I can identify with.

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Although almost seven years ago I noted that I'd found myself, probably for the first time, agreeing with the Pentagon about something, I've never felt comfortable with the fact that a tool which has been, for over a decade, the source of both my livelihood and the focus of much of my extra-personal life had its origins in the military. I knew that I was evolving from a different branch of that tree, but didn't know how to give voice to the roots from which I sensed I was growing, or even to clearly identify those roots. Two relatively recent books have done a good job of doing just that. John Markoff's What the Dormouse Said: How the 60s Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer (an excerpt is available here), and Fred Turner's From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism (the introduction and a chapter are available here) suggest that though Flower Power supposedly died more than a generation ago, it may actually have been faking its death in order to escape a ravaged Haight-Ashbury and reestablish a different sort of temple.

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Go to: So what if they were giants, or
Go to: Carrying cognitive baggage from the old country