The hippies
That the modern technological revolution — that of personal computers, the Internet, intelligent devices — has been nourished by the vision and seed of the Californian counterculture of the 60s is something beyond dispute. The culture of the hippies has percolated into the minds of the protagonists of this revolution and into the organizations they gave birth to. The epicenter of this earthquake was and is Silicon Valley, the area between San Francisco and San José. How this happened is explained very well in a book, From Satori to Silicon Valley, by cultural historian Theodore Roszak. It was Roszak himself who coined the term "counterculture". The book will soon be available also in Italian.
The counterculture has been a vast and epochal phenomenon and one does not immediately associate it with the computers and technology of which Silicon Valley is the nucleus. Yet in the seventies and eighties a bond was established. Perhaps it was precisely the products of technology that became the vehicle through which an alternative movement such as the counterculture forcefully entered the mainstream of global lifestyles.
It was above all the community ideal of the hippies, their libertarian nature, the desire to broaden horizons and contempt for centralized authority to firmly hoist the philosophical and ethical foundations of the Internet and the entire revolution of the personal computer. The latter started right towards the twilight of that experience. The mantra that still echoes in the Valley today it's not much different from what it was then. Only there to change the world. They will change that with their products, because their products will broaden people's minds and their way of life. Didn't the hippy counterculture want the same thing?
The nerds
If a major current of cyberculture owes a lot to hippies and their lifestyle and thinking, the other major current, colder, has its identity stock in a different form of maladjustment and discomfort, that of nerds. Its epicenter could be Seattle where Microsoft, founded by Bill Gates, is based. And where Amazon is also based. 25 years ago, Jeff Bezos chose it for its low tax profile.
THU there is not so much counterculture, but the belief in the centrality of technology. Not only for the future of our societies and the well-being of people, but also for its strength as a direct vehicle for personal affirmation and power.
Both these currents found a confluence in the desire to build an alternative to the institutional and entrepreneurial installations of the East Coast that dominated the technology landscape in the late 60s. Conservative and hierarchical, assertive and dominant organizations, a somewhat brutal expression of the Corporate America of those years.
According to these organizations, computing and computing power should remain the preserve of big business and government and need not be shared with the masses. That was the view of the East Coast old guard, the Watsons of IBM, or even a brilliant technologist like Ken Olsen of Digital Equipment.
Start a business and change the world
For this hippies hated computers. Nerds, by contrast, loved them, but fought for something different, but ultimately convergent. They wanted access to these tools to be unlimited and total. It was not to be controlled and regimented by an institutional power or a conservative and pervasive corporation. The access and diffusion of computational resources, skills and knowledge would lead nerds to dominate the world.
In its ultimate aims it was not a grand vision of social liberation, but on many intermediate points of the project it coincided with that of a group of hippies. There was, in fact, a large platoon of them who thought that computers really could become an instrument of liberation personal energies, creativity and emancipation. A tool, like LSD, to feed their thirsty minds for new experiences. As avid science fiction readers, something in common with nerds, they imagined the enormous potential of intelligent machines, for better and, I would add, for worse.
But what could be the most effective means of transferring that project of liberation from their minds to reality? Politics, education, media, literature? No, the main tool was doing business. In other words, starting a technological enterprise and making it grow until the scepter is taken away from the dominant industrial economic complex.
The triumph of the nerds
In 1996 Channel 4 and PBS (the American public service television) distributed a documentary called The Triumph of the Nerds filmed by an "InfoWorld" journalist and technology expert, Robert X. Cringely. Indeed, following our pattern, in 1996 the nerds had triumphed. Microsoft under the leadership of the prince of nerds, Bill Gates, dominated the entire industry.
All his rivals were in a critical situation. Apple was on the verge of bankruptcy, Steve Jobs' NeXT was shutting down, IBM, after the failure of OS2, was about to leave the mass computing sector. Microsoft was expanding from the consumer to the corporate market with solutions and ideas that were beginning to frighten the big incumbents who had controlled it for decades. Furthermore the nerd generation was settling in large computer centers of multinationals and large American companies. Here they brought a whole new view of old-guard managers trained on mainframes.
The only real threat to Microsoft's dominance, the web, was still in its infancy. The cold current of nerds seemed to have prevailed over the warm current of hippies. And the web will be the place where the anarchist and libertarian culture of the hippies would rise from the ashes and where Microsoft's will to power would be broken.
For his documentary Cringely he made a large number of interviews with the best known and least known protagonists of the computer revolution. One of them was with Steve Jobs. Jobs was still engaged in the uncertain experience of NeXT, but already making a strong comeback thanks to the extraordinary success of Pixar that had made him a billionaire again. Jobs spoke for 70 minutes, but Cringely only used a quarter of an hour of footage. The original tape was lost only to be fortunately found in 2012 and become a film.
Closing the conversation, Cringely asked Jobs if he felt more like a hippie or a nerd. You can already imagine the answer.
Are you hippy or nerd?
If I really have to choose between the two, I clearly choose hippies. All the people I worked with were in this category. If you ask me what a hippy is, I tell you that this is a word that can have many connotations, but not for me who grew up in that climate. It just happened in the backyard of my house. For me it meant that there was something more than what was expected of life. There was more to it than work, family, two cars in the garage and one's career.
There was another side of the coin that wasn't talked about, there was something that went beyond the usual. And the hippie movement started experimenting with what that was all about. He wanted to discover something different from what their parents showed him or expected of them in life. There was a germ of change, that germ made people want to become poets rather than bankers.
The spirit of the products
It's a wonderful thing and it's the same spirit that can be transferred to the products. People who use them can sense that spirit. I'm talking, for example, about people who use Macs and love it. They feel that there is something really wonderful, magical inside. It's not often that people have feelings about products. When it happens it means that there is something special, something alive in them.
Most of the people I've worked with, I believe chose to work with computers for the simple pleasure of working with computers. They have decided to work with computers because they are the means to connect with people and convey their vision to them. First of all, it makes sense to them. If there hadn't been computers these people would have done other things, but when computers were invented, they saw in them the means to be able to say something to the world.
Computer: the bicycle of the mind
When I was young, I read an article in Scientific American that struck me. He spoke of motor efficiency in the different species on the basis of the kilocalories spent to travel one kilometre. At the top of the ladder was the Condor. Mankind, the ruler of creation, figured at the bottom of the league table. But if the man took a bicycle he ousted the Condor from the supreme position and took it for himself.
This observation had a major impact on me. It made me realize that mankind can build tools that dramatically expand their innate capabilities. The personal computer is the bicycle of the mind. I think with complete conviction that, of all the inventions of humanity, the computer goes to rank at the top. As time passes we realize that the computer is the most amazing tool we have ever invented. And I feel lucky to be in the place where all this happened and is happening, Silicon Valley, at the very moment in history when it happens.
I think when people look back on this period a hundred years from now they will see it as a very important period in history and especially in this field, believe it or not. If we think about the innovation that has come out of this place, Silicon Valley and the entire San Francisco Bay Area, we have a lot going on. We have the invention of the integrated circuit, the microprocessor, the semiconductor. We have the invention of the modern hard drive and other mass storage devices. Above all there was the invention of the personal computer, genetic engineering, object oriented technology, graphical user interfaces invented by PARC, later also developed by Apple. Finally there was the network connection. All of this happened in the Bay Area. It's incredible.
Why Silicon Valley
These are special places. For two or three reasons. We need to go back a bit in history. San Francisco was the birthplace of the beat generation, which is kind of interesting, there were the hippies. It was the only place in America where Rock 'n Roll really caught on, right? Most of the American bands all came from here. I think Joan Baez, Jefferson Airplane, the Grateful Dead. They were all from here, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, everybody.
How did it happen? There's Stanford and Berkeley, two amazing universities that attract smart people from all over the world and deposit them in this nice, clean, sunny place where there are so many other smart people and the food is really good.
It also runs a lot of drugs and there's a lot of other fun stuff. That's why they stayed, there is an immense human capital that continues to pour here. There are really smart people. Here people seem much smarter and more open-minded than in the rest of the country. I think it's a very unique place and its history has proved it. That's why it keeps attracting people.
Computer art is a liberal art
Here a taste has also been forged, a philosophy which consists in wanting to do the best things that can be done, in competing with those that have already been done and in replicating them in one's work. Picasso said that good artists copy, but great artists steal. And there's no shame in stealing great ideas.
I think what made The Macintosh great is that the people who worked on it were musicians, poets, artists, zoologists and historians. They also happen to be the best computer scientists in the world. If they could not express their talent in this field, they would have done extraordinary things in other fields of life and work. We have all seen the computer as a liberal art and, perhaps wrongly, we wanted to bring to this field what was best in the liberal arts. I don't think you can do this if you're closed-minded.
That is, if you are not a hippy.
