We Owe It All to the Hippies (1995)

http://members.aye.net/~hippie/hippie/special_.htm

by daddy_drank • 12 years ago

76 63 12 years ago

members.aye.net

eevilspock• 12 years ago

No.

  hippie != libertarian
  hippie != hipster

ardit33• 12 years ago

hippie == live and let live, fuck the man, and peace love and harmony, oh, and lots of drugs and sex, music and drum circles.

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

deciplex• 12 years ago

Nothing you listed, in moderation, precludes addressing real responsibilities as a 'real' adult.

coldtea• 12 years ago

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

The whole idea is that it isn't something just for 20-year olds. So the "sounds like fun, until you hit real adulthood and real responsibilities" part is a total misunderstanding of the thing.

What did hippie-ism in is mostly human relations and psychology (feuds, jealoushy, power plays, etc) than people reaching some imaginary "real adulthood" that prevents it, and the fact that for a lot of people it was a temporary fad.

There have been very active hippies well into their forties and even seventies, and of course there have been older people, and people who spent their whole lives, in lots of similar "outsider" movements who didn't give up.

justatdotin• 12 years ago

peace love and harmony ARE real adult resposibilities.

return02• 12 years ago

That's an easy way to dismiss anything that would change anyone's life anywhere.

xj9• 12 years ago

I know lots of functional, adult hippies. I can't say I'm a "real adult", exactly, because I just turned 23 a couple of weeks ago and I'm really still a young adult.

Here's the thing: I'm a hippie, full-on free love, fuck the man, LSD, everything. I own a sheep-skin drum. I'm also the lead software developer at a small marketing company and I do freelance work on the side. I live with two friends who are going through some tough times and I willingly pay all of the bills, I'm like a fucking dad.

Maybe you should take another look at what constitutes "real adulthood" and "real responsibilities".

arjie• 12 years ago

That may be true, but I find it hard to assign any of the meanings of 'hipster' to the word hippie in the article. That and 'hipster' as we know it today wasn't that popular a epithet in 1995.

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.

vidarh5• 12 years ago

Maybe you'r not aware who Steward Brand (the author) is.

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.

theoh• 12 years ago

justanother• 12 years ago

If there's one thing I enjoy from music (and music videos) from the 1980s, it is the unbounded optimism and bubbly nature. We were going to change the world, "with _science_!" And I often think of the early-to-mid 1990s Internet as a hangover of this mentality. We laughed off the Clinton Administration's Clipper chip, even as rumors abounded of the NSA peering at every NAP. We were, after all, unstoppable. We were going to change the world with science.

I don't want to sound too negative, because it's never too late for a comeback, but for the moment at least, this thing has been turned against us by corporate interests and the NSA. Were I a pessimist, I'd quote Easy Rider and say, "You know, man, we blew it."

That is, if I were a pessimist. I'm still pretty sure we can put this thing together like it was supposed to be.

sehugg• 12 years ago

The relevant Easy Rider quote I had in mind is: "You know, this used to be a helluva good country. I can't understand what's gone wrong with it."

malka2• 12 years ago

Well, first, you started the war on drugs. It brougth more drugs. Then you started the war on terror.Guess what the result were?

You should start a war on jobs. Maybe it'll work.

mwfunk• 12 years ago

Looking back at media from that time, there was what looks like a quaint optimism now. But from what I remember from living in the '80s, there was also a darkness that is just not really a thing anymore.

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.

Cowicide6• 12 years ago

I remember just taking the inevitability of nuclear war almost as a given.

It was damn closer than most people realize. That nutball Reagan nearly killed all of us:

http://www.alternet.org/story/149821/how_reagan_brought_the_...

And, we're not out of the woods yet.

If we end up with another madman Republican perhaps like McCain, we'll probably get sent over the edge with Russia since we already know that Putin is also a nut.

Not to mention Russia was perhaps (arguably) on its way to launching nukes on a false alarm if it wasn't for one guy who didn't follow orders:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislav_Petrov#The_incident

Maybe if he hadn't disobeyed orders someone else would've stopped the launch, maybe not. But, considering the incredible stakes, I think it was all just a bit too close for comfort either way.

Moral of the story? Live every day like it's your last day on Earth, because someday it'll be true.

arh682• 12 years ago

(: thanks. Your comment helps put [1] in perspective for me, helps place it in the zeitgeist.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Terminator

davidw• 12 years ago

A nice video that captures some of that is Fishbone's "Party at Ground Zero"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Party_at_Ground_Zero

vidarh5• 12 years ago

I grew up in Norway. The pivotal moments of the 80's for me were things like going to school in 1986 and exchange dark jokes about the radiation clouds heading our way from Chernobyl. Or waking up my parents to tell them about the assassination of the Swedish prime minister Olof Palme. And Tiananmen Square. Hardly uplifting moments. And an endless stream of civil wars where the insurgents and governments where alternately supported by the Soviet Union and the US.

It was reflected everywhere in popular culture too: One one hand you had the excesses, but on the other you had the post-apocalyptic movies as you point out, and comics. I remember in particular Watchmen, which to me in many ways captures that feeling amazingly well. (I didn't actually read the original when it was released; but I very much remember the discussions around it, and remember seeing the ominous front pages in the news stand as they were released)

Ironically, the Watchmen movie caught a lot of flack when it was released for the music choices, many of which seemed strange to those not growing up during that era, or perhaps not growing up in Europe during that era (though set largely in the US, Watchmen is very much British in sensibilities - not surprising given Alan Moore). But songs like Nena's 99 Luft Baloons captured the feeling perfectly for me. A lot of the music in Watchmen was what I listened to in the 80's when I was feeling in melancholic mood...

(And since I brought up comics, there's of course Frank Millers "The Dark Knight Returns")

A lot of the light-hearted music and movies from the 80's feel like shallow veneer over that darker undercurrent.

bowlofpetunias• 12 years ago

Which 80's are you talking about? What I remember is dark music, "no future" graffiti, riots, heroine junkies in the alley and the ever-present "reality" that some day soon they were gonna use the nukes and it would all be over anyway.

dredmorbius6• 12 years ago

Where was this, if I might ask?

The junkies part in particular didn't seem as mainstream / widespread as it is now. Perhaps in certain areas, but it seems pretty uniform today.

yodsanklai• 12 years ago

We were going to change the world, "with _science_!"

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

Negitivefrags• 12 years ago

And why cant they be?

If there is a breakthrough in energy a lot of things become possible to fix with brute force approaches.

dasil003• 12 years ago

Certainly the oil company execs whisper themselves to sleep with this each night.

dredmorbius6• 12 years ago

As one who was there, I'd argue it was a time that was fairly optimistic (there's some truth to the whole John Hughes movie archetype), but not without some shades of darkness as well. Some of that's reflected in The Breakfast Club come to think of it: wealth disparities (Claire, the rich kid), blue-collar uncertainties (Andrew), future pysch case (Allison), genius (Brian), and budding criminal (John).

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.

rodw• 12 years ago

Excellent post, but I don't know why you linked to that cheesy video for the Timbuk3 song. The actual "official" music video can be found at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8qrriKcwvlY (http://fixyt.com/watch?v=8qrriKcwvlY).

lkrubner• 12 years ago

About naive optimism: I have a friend who lead the team at AOL, back in 1991, that built the chat client for AOL. At the time, he and his team sincerely believed that they were ending war forever, for surely, they thought, once there was an easy to use GUI chat client that allowed all the people of the world to chat, then there could never be war again.

rdl2• 12 years ago

Gen X had a lot more to do with the useful parts of the Internet, along with pre-Baby Boomer scientists, than the boomers (and thus hippies).

dredmorbius6• 12 years ago

Hard to say, it's been a lot of development all the way through.

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.

rdl2• 12 years ago

Ah -- I forgot most of the people in the early Arpanet/Internet in the 70s were grad students or otherwise fairly early-career, so they were Boomers, vs. mid/late career at the time, so Greatest or Silent Generation.

Animats• 12 years ago

Nah. The people who really made it happen weren't hippies.

arh682• 12 years ago

Just as personal computers transformed the '80s, this latest generation knows that the Net is going to transform the '90s. With the same ethic that has guided previous generations, today's users are leading the way with tools created initially as "freeware" or "shareware," available to anyone who wants them.

So, did that generation die? I think it died back with Justin Frankel and Shawn Fanning. 'Writing shareware' hasn't really been an acceptable job description since about then.

And if that wave from '95 died, what wave are we in now?

EDIT: PS I just remembered Bram Cohen's name so I'm trying to rethink the generations..

jiggy2011• 12 years ago

Open source is the new shareware I think.

pjc50• 12 years ago

Everything's been professionalised as there are far more people able to write software and far more competition. "Shareware" has been replaced with IAPs, "free to play", and advertising-supported software. Everything is now always connected; there's no advantage to distributing software by mailing out floppy disks and persuading people to hand those disks to others.

Udo• 12 years ago

The existence of shareware was mostly due to an information imbalance and difficulties in distribution. These factors went away when the internet became ubiquitous and fast. Trialware and nagware still exists, though.

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.

wisty• 12 years ago

If you want a free closed-source app with optional upgrades, have a look at your phone.

p4bl0• 12 years ago

I think I already said it on HN, but I really, really recommend reading "DO IT!: Scenarios of the Revolution" by Jerry Rubin.

In my opinion, you can't get the right version of the history of hackers without considering the relationships between the hackers/phreakers movement and the Yippies / Freedom of Speech / Hippies movements.

return02• 12 years ago

It's weird how the children of those hippies are in a frantic pursuit to turn those ideas back into silo'ed, patented and monetized startups, while still claiming to be open. There lurks a deep incompatibility between the two, but still so far the system is working. Money seems to be one of the things the hippie revolution did not change, and while there is brand new technology for money, we 'll never see a "couchsurfing for money".

In the end, here we are talking about it in the forums of a private startup incubator...

blueskin_2• 12 years ago

communalism and libertarian politics

Aren't these two things completely mutually exclusive?

(NB: Obviously, being able to choose communalism or individualism as you prefer makes the two semi-compatible, but not the aforementioned as a public policy...)

duairc2• 12 years ago

No, not at all. I would argue that one implies the other. Historically, and still to this day in much of Europe, the term "libertarianism" is a synonym for anarchism, i.e., libertarian communism.

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

blueskin_2• 12 years ago

Communism itself is the opposite of individualism; a centrally planned economy doesn't need innovators, it needs Citizen 647,203 to work at his assigned job in Agricultural Collective 63 and not get thoughts above his station lest he be sent to the gulag.

I'm British, and I can tell you libertarianism here does not mean anarchism (or the popular US version of 'libertarianism' either, AKA conservativism with legal cannabis).

Also remember why communistic economies fail - again, it's the lack of drive to innovate. If you have a dull, tedious, mind-numbing job and you get paid (or food stamps or whatever) the same value no matter whether you work hard, innovate, and improve processes or bump along at the bottom doing the bare minimum, people are going to gravitate towards the latter. As such, technological development stagnates, processes never change even when deeply flawed, and bureaucracy becomes entrenched in defending their own jobs.

vidarh5• 12 years ago

Libertarian socialists would often argue that you can't have a genuinely right wing libertarianism.

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.

JoeAltmaier2• 12 years ago

Thank you, that makes clear why Libertarianism is so impractical and essentially doomed. Property rights are central to the functioning of a modern society. Extreme views would cripple a nations economic and social growth. Any country that adopted draconian property views would be marginalized in the world community.

normloman• 12 years ago

So hippies wrestled technology away from centralized control (mainframes), started their own businesses, and slowly rebuilt centralized control (the cloud).

You know what I hate about hippes? How self congratulatory they are.

jonjacky• 12 years ago

See also the same author's (Stewart Brand) Rolling Stone article about SAIL, Xerox Parc, and ARPA -- written during the hippie era, in 1972!

http://www.wheels.org/spacewar/stone/rolling_stone.html

It has been discussed previously in HN:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5548719

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1697569

We Owe It All to the Hippies (1995)

Related Stories