[TUHS] Were all of you.. Hippies?

[Steffen Nurpmeso]

jnc at mercury.lcs.mit.edu (Noel Chiappa) wrote:
 |> From: Steffen Nurpmeso
 |
 |> This "We owe it all to the Hippies"
 |
 |Well, yes and no. Read "Hackers". There wasn't a tremendous overlap between

So you went through this 30 years ago already.  I see, maybe.
From Steven Levy?!  Have it now, but it could be i won't be able
to read it all, it seems to have this language of the 80s, wadded
shoulders and neon colours, that decade nothing but the decay of
the 70s.  And i have grown up with "Wargames", which was earlier.

 |But remember things like this, from the dust-jacket of the biography of
 |Prof. Licklider:

Hmm, i have the feeling that "Biographies" tend more and more into
fictional direction.  A few decades back (say, at the end of the
90s i think it was) we in Germany had a "Sow of the Week" ("Die
Sau durch's Dorf treiben", "Compelling the Sow through the
Village", i _think_ based on Prussian Military tradition of
a fustigation for soldiers who need to pass a lane of other
soldiers with sticks) caused by a professor who proclaimed that
entire centuries of history (anno domini) did not exist, were
plain "fake news".  Just this weekend there was a book review on
Julian Barnes "The Noise of Time", referring to Dmitri
Shostakovich, it seems to be thrilling.  I haven't read it on my
own, however.

But anyway all this feels like a decline compared to that mankind
was based on either purely oral or also written tradition for so
many thousand years.  The Bushmen and Aborigine put full trust in
oral tradition, i think we put trust in the hieroglyphs of the
Egyptians.  Noone will put trust in us, and that only if
bitsavers.org will survive.

  ...
 | that will change forever the way computers are perceived. Somehow, the
 | occupant of that office ... has seen a future in which computers will \
 | empower
 | individuals, instead of forcing them into rigid conformity. He is almost
 | alone in his conviction that computers can become not just super-fast
 | calculating machines, but joyful machines: tools that will serve as \
 | new media
 | of expression, inspirations to creativity, and gateways to a vast world of
 | online information.
 |
 |Now, technically Lick wasn't a hippie (he was, after all, 40 years old in
 |1965), and he sure didn't have a lot of hippie-like attributes - but \
 |he was,
 |in some ways, an ideological close relative of some hippies.

It seems to me that many attributes of the hippie movement can at
least in parts be found in the international squad of scientists.
I think in science some core values of "the light" make a living,
for example it doesn't really matter where you come from, what
counts is your intellectual output.  Mistakes "don't matter" as
long as you can prove that it was based on some real thoughts.

Of course that is "the light" only from the intellectual side, not
the spiritual or emotional, therefore not being holistical, which
was, to me, the Hippies, though as always, it depends on the
end-user.  Having watched films of sessions with Leary, and seeing
a young man on trip with his sheepdog on his crossed legs,
stroking her (the dog), and obviously having the realization that
this person (the dog) would die for him (the young man) as
necessary, is an example of the other side.

--steffen