Cold war meets counterculture: how hippie hero Stewart Brand created our wired world.

• Author: Doherty, Brian
• Position: From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism - Book review

In 1964, young protesters at Berkeley used computer punch cards as a symbol of everything dehumanizing in postwar American culture. By 1984, an iconic ad presented the Macintosh as a muscular woman destroying a futuristic dictatorship. How did the computer evolve from enemy of individuality to tool of personal empowerment?

The Stanford historian Fred Turner answers that question From Counterculture to Cyber culture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and Rise of Digital Utopianism (University of Chicago), a thoughtful and brilliantly reported book. As the subtitle indicates, Turner argues that one man--the journalist, publisher, and cultural entrepreneur Stewart Brand--lies at the heart of the social transformation. He makes a strong case, painting Brand as a well--connected node in the network that forget the digital age.

The 68-year-old Brand make his living today as a writer and a business consultant. But he is most famous for founding the Whole Earth Catalog, the extremely popular counterculture handbook of the late '60s and early' 70s. Offering "access to tools," the catalog's central idea was that technology could be liberating rather than oppressive. As Brand put it in the catalog's statement of purpose, "We are as gods and might as well get good at it."

His Whole Earth background might make it easy to pigeonhole Brand as a back-to-the-land hippie. But his worldview didn't arise merely from hanging out with the Merry Pranksters and other bohemian arts gangs of the '60s. He was also influenced by a set of postwar intellectuals who viewed society and technology as an interconnected "whole system" that can be modeled, guided, and improved.

One was Norbert Wiener, the "cyberneticist" who helped develop new anti-aircraft weapons, and whose work described the interconnections and similarities between the ways both technologies and human beings function. Another was Buckminster Fuller, the polymath who invented the geodesic dome and whose ideas about researchers crossing disciplinary and institutional lines were, Turner argues, intimately connected with Cold War military research.

Cybernetic thinking was replete with talk of hypnotism, conditioned reflexes, and other tools of social control. To quote the ominous title of one of Wiener's bestsellers, it explored The Human Use of Human Beings. Fuller, meanwhile, called for "comprehensive designers" with power over individual decisions.

Fortunately, Brand's attraction to Wiener and Fuller...