In "From Counterculture to Cyberculture", Fred Turner details the previously untold story of a highly
influential group of San Francisco Bay Area entrepreneurs: Stewart Brand and the Whole Earth network. Between 1968
and 1998, via such familiar venues as the National Book Award - winning "Whole Earth Catalog", the computer-conferencing
system known as WELL, and, ultimately, the launch of the wildly successful Wired magazine, Brand and his colleagues
brokered a long-running collaboration between San Francisco flower power and the emerging technological hub of
Silicon Valley. Thanks to their vision, counterculturalists and technologists alike joined together to reimagine
computers as tools for personal liberation, the building of virtual and decidedly alternative communities, and
the exploration of bold new social frontiers.While tracing the extraordinary transformation of how our networked
culture came to be, Turner's fascinating book reminds us that the distance between the Grateful Dead and Google,
between Ken Kesey and the computer itself, is not as great as we might think.
Table of Contents
1. The shifting politics of the computation metaphor
2. Stewart brand meets the cybernetic counterculture
3. The Whole Earth catalog as information technology
4. Taking the Whole Earth digital
5. Virtuality and community on the WELL
6. Networking the new economy
7. Wired
8. The triumph of the network mode
