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.
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.
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:
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.
Keep in mind, the FP article really doesn't do much to discount the piece I linked to and, as a matter of fact, reinforces just how close Reagan brought us to the brink of nuclear destruction.
From the FP article you linked to:
"His dread only grew by year's end when he learned that his nuclear buildup and anti-Soviet speeches had so terrified Kremlin leaders that they interpreted a nato war game as preparation for a real attack and put their military on high alert."
If it wasn't for reforms in the USSR (see Gorbachev), things might have very well ended in a nuclear holocaust due to Reagan's initial war mongering.
> to balance some of that out a bit
I'm not sure you read the article I linked to fully. It mentions Reagan's efforts to bring us back from the brink after he first disparaged and dismissed the nuclear freeze movement. The article actually mentions the fact that Reagan even went further than activists had asked for:
From the article I linked to:
" ... by the time of Reagan’s second term, the nuclear weapons policies of his administration actually went far beyond what the organizers of the freeze campaign had advocated. The Reagan Administration did not just halt the nuclear arms race, it actually began to reverse it."
But, for FP to try to polish Reagan up as a man of peace terrified of war is a bit delusional once we consider what it took to finally get him to cool his heels and desperately kick in massive damage control in the nick of time before nuclear armageddon. It's also interesting that FP didn't mention activists and their effect on the issue.
And, again, if it wasn't for the dumb luck of Gorbachev taking power, I have sincere doubts that Reagan could have rectified his previous war mongering in time.
As I said, we came much closer than most realize and Reagan nearly sent us all off the nuclear rails.
I read the article. It was interesting but like so many others it puts all the blame at Reagan's feet, and brushes over the culture of extreme paranoia the Soviet leadership had at the time due to poor intelligence:
"The greatest catalyst to the Able Archer war scare occurred more than two years earlier. In a May 1981 closed-session meeting of senior KGB officers and Soviet leaders, General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev and KGB chairman Yuri Andropov bluntly announced that the United States was preparing a secret nuclear attack on the USSR"
>I read the article. It was interesting but like so many others it puts all the blame at Reagan's feet, and brushes over the culture of extreme paranoia the Soviet leadership had at the time due to poor intelligence
You may have read the article, but I don't think you read it very throughly. They didn't put all the blame on Reagan alone. That's incorrect. They mentioned Soviet culpability within the article.
via page two:
"An argument can be made, of course, that it was not the Reagan Administration alone that was responsible for either the confrontational Soviet-American relations of the time or the acceleration of the nuclear arms race. The two adversaries had been locked eyeball-to-eyeball since the waning days of the Second World War in 1945. The USSR had spent much of the 1970s stirring up trouble and expanding its influence throughout the "Third World." They had deployed troops to Afghanistan to save their tottering client government in Kabul on Christmas Day 1979. They had pursued several rounds of nuclear buildups of their own (and in fact had deployed medium-range ballistic missiles in Europe first). Soviet leaders, of course, always claimed that their international behavior was defensive in nature -- undertaken because we were out to get them. And we always claimed that our international behavior was defensive in nature -- undertaken because they were out to get us. "
Considering the other parts you missed previously, I would suggest you re-read the article I linked to if you want to form a more valid opinion of it.
Considering the guy who personifies the "madman theory" was a disgraced guy like Nixon who was obviously a paranoid, etc. -- I'd take the theory with a grain of salt. :D
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.
>It's funny how people who kept warning that Reagan was going to start a nuclear war have never gotten over being completely wrong.
Just because we didn't actually all die in nuclear war doesn't mean people's fears were unfounded. That's a bit of a false argument you're making there.
Reagan nearly brought us to nuclear war. If anything, that proved their fears to be correct.
>They really seem disappointed that it never happened.
I can't speak for "they", but in my case I'm really "disappointed" that he brought us so close to nuclear war.
And while we're making false arguments here... If you're content with coming close to nuclear armageddon, then we'll just have to agree to disagree. :D
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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":
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.
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.
> 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..
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...)
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.
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.
> 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.
Misinterpret draconian: no property laws, or absolute sanctity of property would be Libertarian extremes. They can't work as well as something in between.
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.
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.
There nothing in communism that requires a centrally planned economy. In fact, a lot of communist ideologists would insist that a centrally planned economy is fundamentally incompatible with communism, as it requires a central authority to enforce decisions and many see a central authority as incompatible with a class free society.
I'm in the UK, and libertarianism here most certainly does mean anarchism to a lot of people, socialism to others, though it is probably today more commonly used about factions of Thatcherites.
The word itself was first used by a French anarchist and communist, and it has a long history in Europe (150 years+) of being used about left wing organisations, and only a few decades of use about the right wing.
In the UK, the use of the term date at least as far back as the 1880's, when some prominent members of the Socialist League (1885), which counted people like Engels and Eleanor Marx as it's supporters, considered themselves libertarians.
> Also remember why communistic economies fail
No country to my knowledge have claimed to have had a communist economy. Some have claimed to be socialist, and many socialists would disagree with that as well.
Your comment seems to assume that these terms are applied to just one ideology. Meanwhile there's an old joke that if you put two Marxists in a room, you will have three different opinions about what Marxism is. And Marxism again is just one of many dozens of socialist ideologies that differ widely.
Even in Marx' days, Marx and Engels devoted a substantial proportion of the Communist Manifesto not to criticise capitalism, but to criticise other socialist ideologies that they saw as ranging from hopelessly utopian, to reactionary: worse than capitalism.
Communism is not the opposite of individualism, that's nonsense. Have a look at "The Right to be Greedy: Theses on the Practical Necessity of Demanding Everything". Greed in its fullest sense is the only possible basis for a communist society.
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.
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.
>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.
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".
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.