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By Root 474 0

Berlin Wall serves as an effective symbol of the turning point from a world of walls to a world of webs. Though rarely noted, there is a direct line connecting the social unrest that reached a boiling point in 1968 and the world-transforming events of 1989. During the middle of the twentieth century, the ideology of the Cold War formed the foundation of a world system that created stability in the midst of considerable tension by setting two clearly defined adversaries against each other. When the Berlin Wall fell, it was more the result of economic developments, technological change and the spread of media, popular culture and consumer capitalism than of a calculated military strategy. As new media and information systems became more widely available, walls that governments previously had been able to police became permeable, and change was unavoidable. Karl Marx famously declared that in industrial capitalism, those who control the means of production have the political and economic power to control society. In network culture, by contrast, those who control the means of the reproduction and dissemination of information are able to exercise political and economic power throughout society. The dynamics of power change when societies, nations and finally the world are wired. The distributed structure of information, media and financial networks tends to subvert centralized power and destabilize established authority.

When the story of the Internet and the World Wide Web is told, an important chapter invariably is overlooked. The same 1960s counterculture that despised the military, resisted the war in Vietnam, marched for civil rights and disrupted college and university classrooms played a critical role in creating the technological revolution that made the emergence of network culture and with it a new economic order all but inevitable. The distance separating Haight-Ashbury from Silicon Valley is not as great as it initially appears. Young people in the sixties were divided between those who were concerned with political transformation and those who were preoccupied with personal transformation. Both groups shared suspicions about the so-called System and were committed to social change. Where they differed was on how best to bring that change about. Political activists argued that to change minds, you must first change society; hippies countered that it is necessary to change consciousness to transform the world. Though neither side ever converted the other, they were able to join forces in the common cause of personal and social change. For those who directed their efforts to changing consciousness, computers eventually replaced drugs as the mind-altering agent of choice. Stewart Brand, onetime member of Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters (whose band was the Grateful Dead), founder of the legendary Whole Earth Catalog and author of The Media Lab: Inventing the Future at MIT, makes this telling point clearly and concisely: “This generation swallowed computers,1 just like dope.” Many early enthusiasts believed that personal computers, connected in ever-expanding networks, held the promise of creating a more humane world by bringing people from different cultural, racial, ethnic and religious backgrounds together. As information and knowledge spread, consciousness would be transformed and mutual understanding would grow. Intoxicated with more than PCs, these visionaries obviously overlooked the darker side of digital communication technologies. As people draw closer, differences become more obvious and conflict often erupts. The global village, after all, is not always a peaceful place.

One of the primary places where the counterculture morphed into cyberculture was the early popular website known as the WELL (Whole Earth ’Lectronic Link). On the WELL, writers, artists and freaks joined computer geeks from the San Francisco Bay’s legendary Homebrew Computer Club to debate the social and political implications of personal computers. It was at a meeting of the Homebrew Club that Steve Wozniak first demonstrated what he and his