Hacker News Reader

Comment by bobbyi_settv | Hacker News Reader

I'd recommend "Mondo 2000: A User's Guide to the New Edge" which is a compilation of articles from the magazine about drugs, technology, music and other topics:

http://www.amazon.com/Mondo-2000-Aphrodisiacs-Artificial-Tec...

View on HN

Yes, great stuff, everyone was so idealistic (and naive...) before Facebook and the NSA. Apparently Google wasn't even going to be evil.

Not really. We rallied pretty hard against the Clipper Chip. John Perry Barlow ran in those circles (he interviewed Ted Nelson for one Mondo issue) and the EFF was a big presence in the hacker culture.

I'll admit we were naive about Google, though. But at the time, they were a couple college students taking on "big business". In a way, they were re-democratizing the Internet, and that was a good thing. "Don't be evil" was exactly the kind of message we expected to hear from an Internet company.

Yeah, I wouldn't necessarily call MONDO 100% naive. There was a lot of paranoia about government surveillance and the misuse of technology in its pages as well.

I agree that naive isn't quite the right word. A lot of the attitude and world view have their roots in the 60s counter culture and hacker / raver culture which combine huge optimism in human potential with a deep distrust of authority.

I kind of feel like Google actually believed what they were saying at the time. Paul Buchheit, speaking of "don't be evil," said he "wanted something that, once you put it in there, would be hard to take out"--he wanted people to remember it and call them out if they broke it.

The fact that Page and Brin have increasingly distanced themselves from it, and gotten increasingly irritated when reminded of it, says to me that they've changed a lot since back then. The people they are today would never have saddled themselves with such a slogan in the first place.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com