starts good, but drags on a bit and gets repetitive. mid

Going by the number of annotations I made and other works I linked them too, this is one of the best reads I had in the past year or so. It tells what silicon-valley culture became along what Steward Brand did, so to say. Reading other reviews, the language and content seems to split the audience. Among other academic books in the genre of cultural history, the text is really well written. There are few fancy words, the language has a drive forward as the sentences are long but do not require jumping back and forth.
Having said this, the book was such a great source for understanding web/silicon-valley/tech culture better. Sections on the connection of military research and interdisciplinary work; the idea of the world and people as data patterns in cybernetic systems; Fuller’s comprehensive designer (Who is rather similar than todays promises of "Design Thinking"); How individualism and community were thought together (Which is a large influence of the cultures of web communities and open source); the charismatic leaders who did not appear as leaders; the focus on "tools", the imagination of living on a frontier…

If you are interested in this, you might like Turner’s smaller articles like "Burning man at google" (https://fredturner.stanford.edu/wp-co...) and his interviews like "Don’t be evil" in logic mag (https://logicmag.io/justice/fred-turn...)

This well-written, well-researched book was disappointing to me. Stewart Brand clearly forged important links between the counterculturalism of the 1960s and the libertarian, cyber networks of our time, but Turner fails to make a case for his lasting importance or to demonstrate that our contemporary digital culture would have been significantly different if Brand had never existed. Was Brand a cause or an effect of larger social processes? Turner doesn’t say. Instead, he just chronicle’s Brand’s exploits, leaving the heavy-lifting, social analysis to others.

For my sake, I find Manuel Castell’s work on this topic much richer.

An excellent study of the history and relationship between the counter-culture of the 60s and 70s and the emergence of personal computing and the Internet. I don't think the history of either topic can be fully told or understood without also knowing about the other.

"From Counterculture to Cyberculture" helped me relate my own questions as a modern-day software engineer to the roots of my industry. I often ask myself what happened to the revolution depicted in the famous 1984 Apple ad? Did personal computing truly bring about the change that its founders thought it would? While not going so far as to completely answer these questions, Turner provides a detailed and unbiased cultural history that informs further research into these questions.

If you have any interest in the history of technology or the counterculture of the 60s and 70s, this is essential reading.

It's a history of the earliest start of computers. At the same time, I don't remember much from reading this book (it was a couple years ago). So, it wasn't memorable and didn't give me any advice to better my life or to help me see a clearer picture of reality. Wanna learn about computers and AI? "Rise of Robots" is a better and more contemporary book.

This book was a massive disappointment. I had been wanting to read it for so long and had really been looking forward to it. I had heard about the Whole Earth Catalog and Whole Earth Review and their respective influences for years, and I had been on The WELL for over a decade myself ([email protected]) and thought it was the best BBS ever devised, and of course Wired Magazine was awesome, so I knew this book had to be cool as hell. Boy, was I wrong. I actually almost finished it, almost made it 300 pages through before giving up in disgust. I don't know how you could take such a COOL topic or topics such as Stewart Brand, 60s/70s counterculture, the invention and growth of the Internet, the importance of the Whole Earth Catalog, the influence of The WELL, the influence of Wired, the growth of the New Economy, and so much more, and make it SO DAMN BORING!!! God, this book sucks. It reads like a bad doctoral dissertation, which I guess should come as little surprise since Turner got his PhD at UC San Diego and taught or teaches at Stanford. He's writing to his academic cronies and I guess he's writing to impress them, but it's definitely not for laymen, because he takes a chronology of events, times, places, people, things, happenings, big ideas, etc, et al, and bores you to tears while also beating you over the head with redundancy until you want to bash your head into a concrete wall. This is frankly one of the worst written books I've ever had the misfortune to read and I have no doubt that if ANY other decent writer out there had undertaken to write a book about similar topics, they could have written an engaging, enlightening, entertaining and cool book that would have captured most readers' attentions. Instead, this garbage kills any interest I've ever had in the subject and I'm almost embarrassed now to have been on such a cool and influential BBS as The WELL after Turner has turned his destructive powers of total boredom on it. I'm giving the book two stars instead of one because the topic is good, but the book is not. Most definitely not recommended. I can't stress that enough.

This is an important book about the culture that existed during the early years of the PC revolution and the creation of the Internet. The focus is on Stewart Brand and his circle, but it branches out a bit to consider the ideas of Norbert Wiener and other theorists. I found the prose to be a bit windy, but the overall message is sound and there is nothing else out there that really addresses these issues in a serious way.

https://5cense.com/22/1050.htm

This is an interesting look at part of the career of futurist Stewart Brand. How he want from being involved with out there psychedelic antics of the late 60s to editor of the Whole Earth Catalog for the back to the land communalists in the 70s and founding electronic and journalistic networks in the 80s that lead to the likes of Wired magazine in the 90s.

It is an academic history and focuses on the connections between Brand cybernetic and media ideas and the nascent elements of hacker culture that would be involved in the advent of the personal computer and internet culture. The coverage is often fairly detailed with interviews and other archival sources on the doings of various participants. There is also plenty of commentary about wider historical developments and the complicated politics and aspirations of the various people involved.

I felt that occasionally there were some errors (such as say calling microcomputers minicomputers) that while not particularly egregious made the whole production feel a bit less convincing. Also some of the connections the author attempts to make are a bit speculative and strained.

This took sooooo long to get through! I was curious about the ‘tastemaker’s tastemaker’, ie Stewart Brand who has been a pioneer through the 1960s hippie culture to 1980s personal computing revolution to his relevance today with the Long Now foundation. But I don’t think the book has properly articulated his contribution to the scene as much as being a symbol for tangential ideas. Don’t think I’ve learnt much about Stewart Brand or the transition of ethos between these two cultures.

This is the rare computer-history book that takes a truly critical look at its subjects. It is not your average chronicle of successes and it's not telling us about how its subject is going to save the world. Rather, it takes a look at how networking (as in LinkedIn, not as in Internet) expert Stewart Brand managed to ride the technology rocket to the moon, and shape the discourse around technology into something palatable to his once-commune-dwelling world. It really does what What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry promises on its cover - explores the vaunted connection between Silicon Valley and what he calls the Whole Earth Network, but what is often taken in other accounts to represent a monolithic "counterculture." All of the big names are here: PARC, Homebrew Computer Club, People's Computer Company, but he does not dwell on them, but explains their actual connection to Brand/Whole Earth (if you want those histories, you're better off with Fire in the Valley: The Making of the Personal Computer or Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age.) Really opens your eyes to the idea of legitimacy transfer-a great example of this is where Brand organizes a conference (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hac...) that serves not only to get everyone in Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution into a single building, but also to bring legitimacy and cred to himself and his collaborators.

Giving up with this for the moment. Good Reads tells me I've been 'reading it' for 3 months; just can't psych myself to pick it up (which is weird for a subject matter I'm so into).

Writing is just realllly dry. Will try again in the future. Meh.