We Owe It All to the Hippies (1995)

I graduated from high school in 1989, so this is biased by the fact that I was a kid or a teenager throughout the '80s, so I'm not sure to what degree this was just me. But I remember just taking the inevitability of nuclear war almost as a given. It felt like for my whole life the world was trapped in a Mexican standoff, and the inevitable result was the annihilation of all life on the planet. It's still a possibility, of course, but I just remembered spending a lot of time in the '80s thinking it was inevitable.

When I remember the goofy '80s stuff, it was always in stark contrast to the apocalyptic stuff. The goofiness and bubbliness of '80s media felt like a reaction to the darkness of the reality.

I don't know how much of that undertone of darkness was a shared sentiment vs. my own bias because I was a moody dramatic teenager at the time. The '80s were also the heyday of the global disaster movies, that were about the extinction of the human race. I just remember a steady stream of movies about human extinction from nuclear war, disease, climate change, comets, zombies (of course), aliens, apes, etc. People still make apocalyptic movies, of course, but it just felt like fear of extinction was more in the collective subconscious then than it is now. Or maybe that was just the kind of kid that I was? I'd be interested to hear how others experienced the same years.

This is not only a hippie thing. Many conservatives have faith that global warming or pollution will be eventually solved by science.

The country had come out of Vietnam, the Oil Crises of the 1970s, Watergate, and a lot of distrust over the CIA, FBI, and COINTELPRO (some things never change). The Challenger explosion (January, 1986) and Chernobyl disaster (April, 1986) both suggested profound limits to technology.

There was the threat of nuclear war, the Soviets were The Enemy (or was it Eastasia?), Japan was eating everyone's lunch, and the rustbelt was really starting to show its weaknesses.

At the same time, oil (eventually) got cheap again, the economy began was was a 20 year sustained period of growth, with two minor burps (the 1989 stock market crash, and the early 1990s recession). The Berlin Wall came down and the Soviet Union fell, both almost completely unimaginable even just a few years earlier.

You had your bubbly pop, but there was also the punk movement. Bands like Timbuk3 put out cynical songs like "Futures So Bright I Gotta Wear Shades":

http://fixyt.com/watch?v=gRh4-czxbT0

The uptempo performance is often mistake for optimism, the lyrics say otherwise, as Pat MacDonald clarified in an interview. From Wikipedia:

Pat somewhat clarified the meaning by stating that it was, contrary to popular belief, a "grim" outlook. While not saying so directly, he hinted at the idea that the bright future was in fact due to impending nuclear holocaust. The "job waiting" after graduation signified the demand for nuclear scientists to facilitate such events. Pat drew upon the multitude of past predictions which transcend several cultures that foreshadow the world ending in the 1980s, along with the nuclear tension at the height of the cold war to compile the song.

Dire Straits, "Money for Nothing" also reflected on the contrast between moving refrigerators vs. "See the little faggot with the earring and the makeup" (it was a different age) "got his own jet airplane". Probably moving into the Mission and ruining the neighborhood as well.

And the computer animations were state-of-the-art.

http://fixyt.com/watch?v=lAD6Obi7Cag

There was a sense of possible future problems (energy, oil, we were just starting to hear about CO2), but nothing imminent (other than nuclear annihilation). I'd say that's probably the biggest change now: the global economy has been dragging for 10-15 years now, and there's a distinct sense that the trajectory has changed.

Today, the distribution and adoption challenge is mostly solved through open source software, so I'm guessing that people who would have been shareware authors in the 80s and 90s are simply doing open source (with commercial support, corporate sponsorship, and/or dual licensing) or are working on closed-source commercial software. For that last category, the internet has also lowered the barriers tremendously in every conceivable way.

My guess is the spirit and complex motivations of software authors have not fundamentally changed but have morphed to fill a different eco system.

Without the work of Ritchie and Thompson and Joy, et al, all Boomers, Unix wouldn't have developed as it had. Dennis Ritche was born in 1941. Richard Stallman (1953) brought about GNU and the Free Software revolution, Larry Wall (1954) Perl. The Internet (and Arpanet before it) were both built by Boomers.

Linus Torvalds (1969, Gen X), Linux, Brian Behlendorf (1973, Gen X) Apache. Those two were probably responsible for more of the Linux revolution than anyone else.

Google was created by Gen Xers (Page and Brin, 1973). Yes, they were creating new and useful stuff, but on a base created mostly by Boomers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarchist_communism

The starting point for libertarianism is to maximise individual freedom and minimise restrictions on that freedom. The big white elephant in the room for right wing libertarians is that they want a huge carve out from that: Private property rights are pretty much holy for them.

While for left wing libertarians, private property right is often seen as a central contribution to restrictions on individual freedom. This goes all the way back to Proudhons famous "property is theft".

My personal favourite example is the property right carve-out that is most extensive in the Nordic countries: the Freedom to Roam. To me, who grew up in Norway, it seems ludicrous that property owners should be able to prevent me from walking in a forest. Allowing them to restrict that would be an immense limitation of personal freedom, and the ability to restrict it would not confer any additional freedoms to speak of for those few property owners.

Yet in most places in the world property owners can impose such rights. In Norway they can't (this is mostly true with various exceptions in the different Nordic countries; and to a much lesser extent in the UK and a few other places), though this isn't a result of some modern socialist ideal - the freedom to roam is so ingrained in Nordic culture that the right predates written laws (in Norway it was first codified relatively recently, as it was considered so obvious that it didn't seem to need to be made explicit previously).

Left wing libertarian ideologies tends to take this principle much further: Except for cases where property rights confers a clear increase in individual freedoms, it is suspect. Thus most left-wing libertarian ideologies would allow personal property, including possibly limited land ownership, but would tend to see extensive land ownership, or ownership of extensive capital resources, as threat to the freedom of others.

Sounds like fun, until you hit real adulthood and real responsibilities.

Also, while the whole freedom-from-The-Man thing is common among Libertarians, it is by no means exclusive to them. The ideas espoused in the story could just as well be hippy. With people like Steve Jobs (does not shower, eats only fruits, visits gurus in India) and John Barlow (with the Grateful Dead - commonly related with the hippie movement), we can see that he's aware of what he's talking about. And really, cyberlibertarianism isn't all that far from a hippie version of a world primarily occupied with technology.

He's the founder of Whole Earth Catalog. Founder of the WELL - one of the first virtual communities in the world. Founder of the Long Now Foundation.

He's very much not taking hippie to mean libertarian (at least not in its modern US us) or hipster. He has his "authentic" 60's hippie credentials well in order more than most, and at the same time he was actively involved in, and a first hand witness, to a lot of the early work on the internet, and ran a networked forum/community before most people here were born.

For a good account of the links between the early internet pioneers and the hippie / counter-culture movement in the 60's, read "What the dormouse said" by John Markoff.