
We Owe It All to the Hippies (1995) - daddy_drank
http://members.aye.net/~hippie/hippie/special_.htm 
======
justanother
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.

~~~
mwfunk
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.

~~~
Cowicide
>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_...](http://www.alternet.org/story/149821/how_reagan_brought_the_world_to_the_brink_of_nuclear_destruction)

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](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.

~~~
acheron
It's funny how people who kept warning that Reagan was going to start a
nuclear war have never gotten over being completely wrong. They really seem
disappointed that it never happened.

~~~
existencebox
I think we can excuse humanity from wanting to "learn from our mistakes" so to
say, but to keep in mind that nuclear war isn't really a mistake we'd have
much option to learn from post-factum. If there's any chance we were close to
the brink (and Reagan or not, we were), we need to do as much as we can to
focus on what brought us there and how; but unfortunately, this is in contrast
to the main learning mechanism for many humans, where without the _actual_
disaster, there will be as much "well clearly there was nothing to fear"
ignorance as there is "the sky is falling", and which is more dangerous is in
my opinion debatable.

~~~
Cowicide
Agreed. It reminds me of people that say the TSA's security theatre has kept
us all safe because there hasn't been another major attack on the scale of 911
again.

------
arh68
> _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..

~~~
pjc50
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.

------
theoh
See also
[http://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/F/bo3773600...](http://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/F/bo3773600.html)

------
return0
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...

------
rdl
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).

~~~
dredmorbius
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.

~~~
rdl
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.

~~~
dredmorbius
Some older ones may have been in academic positions. I suspect they'd mostly
have been with IBM or the big corporate computer companies (Burroughs, Sperry-
Rand, Honeywell, etc.).

Unix and Internet were pretty non-commercial at the time.

------
normloman
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
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](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=5548719)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1697569](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1697569)

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

------
p4bl0
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.

------
blueskin_
>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...)

~~~
vidarh
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.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
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.

~~~
vidarh
> Any country that adopted draconian property views would be marginalized in
> the world community.

Almost every country in the world has adopted "draconian property views", so
clearly that is not true.

A small subset have substantially less draconian property views (the Nordic
countries freedom to roam as I mentioned), and are seeing no economic hardship
that can be traced to not being as enthusiastic about harsh property rights.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
Misinterpret draconian: no property laws, or absolute sanctity of property
would be Libertarian extremes. They can't work as well as something in
between.

------
eevilspock
No.

    
    
      hippie != libertarian
      hippie != hipster

~~~
ardit33
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.

~~~
coldtea
> _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.

