DIY media today is a hybrid of the social group formation capabilities of the Internet, which were manifested two decades ago as virtual communities, the production capabilities of affordable digital audiovideo tools, and the broadband distribution capabilities of the Web. That cyber-prehistory context is the subject of this video of Fred Turner’s talk at Harvard’s Berkman center on his new book, From Cyberculture to Counterculture: Stewart brand, The Whole Earth Network, and The Rise of Digital Utopianism

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 explores this extraordinary and ironic transformation by tracing 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. Thanks to their vision, counterculturalists and technologists alike joined together to reimagine computers as tools for personal liberation, the building of virtual and decidedly alternative communities, and the exploration of bold new social frontiers.

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