It's like basing commentary on the current state of internet business on people who have the "Bill Gates in the 70s" Poindexter look.
As a very very brief capsule summary, the 'hippie trail' that started up in the 60s features stops in India, particularly Goa - a bit more westernized than other parts of India, nice weather, very very cheap, and so on. In the late 80s and early 90s the hippie community there turned on to a subset of industrial/electronic music and melded it with a flavor of middle eastern music (thanks to the Moorish conquest of the Iberian peninsula a few centuries prior to the Portuguese colonization of Goa) to produce a musical fusion that became known as Goa Trance. The Levantine musical influence combined with fairly high-tech electronics shortly made Goa a very popular destination for Israelis who had just completed their military service, and Israeli musicians who had a lot of the musical heritage at their fingertips became major players within that scene, resulting in distinct sub-genres.
Meanwhile, the music and the small industry of all-night parties and record labels etc. spread to other popular destinations such as London, Amsterdam and San Francisco, and Tokyo (which also happen to be foci of audio/synthesizer engineering excellence). I made a whole bunch of Israeli friends in the 90s who came to SF because it was part of that music scene while also being in close proximity to Silicon Valley; almost all of them joined or founded startups. I know for sure some of them read Hacker News.
Now, I wouldn't say that the current state of Internet business depends on hippies any more than it depends on Bill Gates' Poindexter look, but there's a closer connection between hippies and the tech scene than you might imagine. While I'm not a hippy myself, as an electronic musician/audio pro/hacker I think the hippie movement has had an important rule in cultural and technological cross-fertilization.