As a life-long student of communication, I somehow missed this one by Fred Turner at Stanford. I personally experienced my own transformation from a countercultural grad student in San Jose to Intel executive in Silicon Valley. This chronicle of how a great countercultural icon like Stewart Brand could morph into the father of digital utopianism, following in the footsteps of Marshall McLuhan is a fascinating trip down memory lane for me. Digital utopianism continues to morph with the rise of the Internet of Things. A bit of a dense academic read, not so much a Tom Wolfe book about Silicon Valley, but worth the ride.

Compelling, scholarly analysis of the influence of the West Coast communalist movement of the late 60s/ early 70s on the development of 1990s cyber-optimism. Nearly biographical account specifically of Stewart Brand of the Whole Earth Catalog / WELL.

I really wanted this book to be better but it just wasn't there. Author writes like a doctoral student and it was a hard book to finish. Very dry which was surprising given the subject. Contained some great anecdotes but overall was very repetitive. A good biography of Stewart Brand would have been much more effective.

Quite repetitive at points, but definitely tracing important and oft overlooked links from the 40's industrial-military-academic complex, 60's countercultural new communalism, and the 90's tech bros and the libertarian new right. It shatters the idea that the new communalist hippies were just anoter flavor of leftists and show how their anti-agonistic and individualistic focus on consciousness expansion led to new computer-oriented variants of the grey bureaucratic systems they once opposed. Now the suits claim to be hip, but are destroying the world all the same.

James Currier recommends

From Counterculture to Cyberculture theorizes that a group of long-bearded; LSD travelers; free lover hippies are the pre-history of the current culture that underlies all those pads; texting and sort of individualistic devices that lead our society to be what it is right now.

This book provides a pretty solid overview of the role of counterculture/associated social movements in the early development of the internet/associated developments. To do so, Turner primarily focuses on the life and work of Stewart Brand and the founders of Wired magazine’s roles in shaping and reacting to historical events and the history of computing writ large and then draws larger conclusions about the tension and synthesis associated with the fundamentally collectivist utopianism many technologists champion and the neoliberal individualism the market rewards.

I did enjoy this book, and I thought Turner makes a strong and meaningful effort to tell a complete and rigorous story without being too dry or verbose. That being said, I often found myself feeling as though his points would benefit from just a little more explanation or additional context (especially if that context followed people who were outside of the core group he fixates on). That being said, I would wholeheartedly recommend it to anyone interested in learning more about the history of computing from a more labor-oriented perspective, and I do think its an important book for anyone developing or trying to understand the development of technology to read and grapple with.

A well-researched profile of Stewart Brand and his cohort, illustrating not only the nuances of the historical connection between communalist strains of the 60s counterculture and internet optimism post-cyberdelia (in a more careful and accurate way than What the Dormouse Said) but the incredible power of Brand's own reputation-building and power-building techniques (which have been more recently replicated by Tim O'Reilley). Made me reconsider a lot of ideas I now realize I had uncritically swallowed from Wired.

It gets four stars instead of five because the prose is dense, businesslike, and somewhat repetitive. If you can stomach dryly-academic books with no stylistic flair, this is a good one.

I initially picked this book since it discusses many events that were part of my life as well -- from the Summer of Love in SF to working for the government on classified computer projects. I always loved the Whole Earth Catalogs and didn't know exactly why. It answered many personal questions I had.

What I found most amazing about the book, however, is the naivety of otherwise intelligent and foresighted people of what the Internet was and would become. In the heady days of the Clinton Administration there was a euphoria about this new thing called the Internet. Many of the people discussed in the book were considered among the intellectual elite at the time. They all saw the Internet as a transformative technology that would finally allow people to talk about issues, share information, and govern themselves without governmental interference.

Alas, this idyllic world was not to be. Governments worldwide (as well as major industries like the music and movie industries) have found ways to harness the Internet for their own purposes. In the last 15 years, governments have found ways to prevent or strictly control citizens’ access to the Internet and the information it provides. Laws have been enacted by the thousands to control citizens’ ability to use the Internet, and technologies have been developed to prevent people from speaking or acting freely.

The optimistic view as recounted in the book of the thinking in the 1990s of what the Internet could become has come face-to-face with the harsh realities of what the Internet has become. And it is not a pretty picture.

I echo the review below that posits this is a relatively sad story. It made me curious to think what the author thinks now over 15 years later and how much computers and the internet have strayed from the countercultural ideologies he accounts for.


Overall I liked the book. It helped me understand cybernetics, a concept I struggled to grasp prior to reading this book. It started to get a bit tedious and ponderous like he was explaining the same things over and over again, I felt like, at times, he could have made the chapters quite a bit shorter. Nonetheless, I do appreciate this book and think it's an important read for people studying the history of computers and the Internet.

Good examination of the past history of cyberculture and how it's affected the present views on information and open source.

brain blowing up rn