Brand’s research is top notch, the concept is fascinating, and I’m desperately reading the movements of the past like it’s going to be a ouija board for the future. But I had to leave it at DNF at 40% — it got soooo incredible detailed and repetitive that it became much harder to follow and find enough momentum to push forward. I only wish there was a little more brevity.

~ essential history ~ for sv culture + one of the best illustrations of how tight networks shape industries over the course of decades -- friends are collaborators are coworkers etc -- & how media can write the future into existence!

Mention of THE WELL bbs brought back memories but the book is too wordy ~ say in ten words what would be just right in five) ~ and the damned font is too small!

If you feel like pounding your head against a brick wall this book's for you.. Have fun..

Garbage, IMHO..

*sigh* What a waste of time.. And the WHOLE EARTH CATALOGUE and WELL, etc, was during MY time in life... I gave it a 2 instead of a 1 only because of nostalgia..

This book is like reading a history of the present written in the past. At least 10 years ahead of its time. I think the author undersells how profound his analysis is, as the tech culture which was permitted by the counterculture has permitted every inch of the knowledge economy, the financial sector and the academy in particular. The author has essentially written historical analysis of the intellectual DNA of the Western (Neo)liberal world. The performative flourishes of Twitter make more sense if you understand the platform itself is embedded with the spirit of the merry pranksters. Also, their lack of desire to censor speech makes much more sense if you view them as the children of the 60s who truly believe that human expression could create new, godlike people liberate through knowledge acquisition. Censorship in that world is more than a betrayal of corporate princiapals, it's a sin. Even the antipathy towards unions makes more sense given they are cast as an extension of the drab, grey, life-denying politics of the white middle class and the failed agonistic politics which brought the Vietnam war, politics you free yourself from first by going to the commune and then by hopping online and becoming enmeshed in cyberspace. Well researched and not a full-throated leftist critique, this seems to have turned some readers off, find the book confusing rather than nuanced. Also people just see bumed out by the relization that hippie counter culture was always holding seeds off of the Cold War techno state which produced it. The truth can be a harsh vibe, I guess. The follow-up I'd love to see is how these counter culture ideologies have permeated the academic/nonprofit worlds, where I imagine many who left the communes went, as well and a deeper analysis of the racism/whiteness of the new communalists. The book hints at the argument that the back to the land movement was essentially another form of "white flight" after the 68 riots and it's this sort of analysis I would have liked to see deeper interogated.

v useful historical context

A well-woven history of the '60s counterculture, as personified in Stewart Brand, and its evolution into the cyberculture that came to prominence in the 1990s with the Internet boom and, in some small part, informs the digital culture of today.

By no means a hagiography of Brand or anyone else, Turner is quick to point out the shortcomings and failings of the movement, both in its manifestation of hippie back-to-the-land fantasies, and its co-evolution with the digital culture birthed by the rise of home computing and Internet access for all. Turner traces the beginnings of Brand's Whole Earth Network and its successors, with Brand's message of technological liberation finding allies as varied as Kevin Kelly and Newt Gingrich. From government research labs to college campuses to rural communes, a freewheeling atmosphere of interdisciplinary technological development was to liberate us all--only it didn't.

Ultimately, the failure of Brand's movement was in its lack of a political agenda. Turner points this out directly. The New Communalists eschewed political resistance of any kind--their way was to disengage and run away, build new lives for themselves on what they saw as a "frontier."

With the rise of the Internet, like-minded people believed this would be possible in a digital space in the ways it wasn't possible in the physical world. But in both cases, they were wrong: problems cannot be escaped by distance, nor does obscuring them via a technical medium qualify as a real solution. Turner also doesn't shy away from pointing out the obvious: that the '60s counterculture and the digital culture that eventually sprang from and found common cause with it was the dominion mostly of white men of means, who were less than knowledgeable of or sympathetic toward people who weren't. Naively, they believed the digital frontier would allow people to leave issues of gender, race, and class behind. The reality has been quite different.

I'm only docking a star because Turner doesn't spend enough time discussing the events or implications of the 1990s Internet boom, nor does his forward-looking conclusion go far enough in examining the successes and (mostly) failures of Brand's movement. Brand succeeded in networking a host of elites, who have largely influenced the way we talk about the Internet but, for the most part, haven't had much impact on how we use it, nor how it's developed over the past decade. Ideals have fallen by the wayside in favor of commercial interests, and the democratic, everyone-has-his-own-soapbox Internet envisioned by the digital elites has instead given way to walled gardens and tightly controlled platforms. The free Internet still exists, but in a lot of ways it lives off to the side of the Internet at large, like a dirty, cluttered garage attached to the much nicer house that naked commercialism built.

Overall, a worthy read, even if scant on details with particular events I'd have liked to hear more about. A skillful recounting of some of the most important philosophical (and personal) history of the Internet.

I'm docking it one star only perhaps because of my own shortcomings as a reader due to lack of practice - this took me two years to finish. This book describes how WWII project management at the dawn of the atomic era evolved into LSD. commune utopia, computer-connected community, Wired magazine and the tech bubble of the late 90's...with a beautiful surprise ending that brings the patient reader back to reality and back to issues unsolved. So wonderful.

KB cited this as being relevant to the statement “Pretty crazy decentralized networks were invented by paul baran at rand corporation”

This book shed light on how the many threads of contemporary cyberculture interrelate. It's no accident that there is a loose affinity between the EFF, Wired, and Burning Man. Now I know why.

Dans mes recherches pour comprendre la contre culture je suis tombée sur ce trésor ! Une mine d'informations, très très dense mais qui explique de façon quasi exhaustive les anecdotes, rouages et personnages qui ont contribués à façonner la contreculture et cyberculture dont nous avons hérité.

I got this as I really enjoyed Stewart Brand's last book, and wanted to know more about him. What I would say about this book is that it really aimed at an academic audience. It gets into _a lot_ of detail and this makes it a very intense read.

The paperback / softback edition is _very_ dense in that it has narrow margins, line spacing and a small font. As a result, I stopped reading about half way through.

If you are a student or an academic, then you might get on with this read. If you are after a relativly easy-to-read biographical or historical account, though, then I would steer clear.

This is quite a tough read in places, because the author drills down to sometimes challenging ideas, but it’s worth sticking with it. What makes it especially interesting is that it was written after the internet changed society, but before the advent of social media changed the internet. I’d be really interested in his views now of the similarities between the commune movements of the 60s and the online communities of 2019; especially post Cambridge Analytica.

I think he misses his target significantly by focussing on Brand and the creators of Wired and not fully examining the role of the counterculture years on the young Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and the others; the Homebrew Computer club gets a brief mention but that’s it. Apart from his role in The Well Brand really isn’t a leading cyber pioneer to my mind.

Where I think he’s spot on is his understanding that both the counterculture and the computer based society of the early internet years were white, privileged and male, and that it depended, and indeed still depends (despite becoming more diverse) on a large working class to produce the infrastructure on which it exists. Were he writing now he would almost certainly have reflected I suspect that while the internet is as full of women as men, they’re the ones getting pictures of genitalia emailed to them...