- Paperback: 354 pages
- Publisher: University of Chicago Press; illustrated edition edition (6 Jun 2008)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0226817423
- ISBN-13: 978-0226817422
- Product Dimensions: 22.8 x 16.4 x 1.9 cm
- Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (1 customer review)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 290,106 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Product Description
Review
"[Turner] postulates that Brand was an idealistic (albeit Barnumesque) leader of a merry band of cybernetic pranksters who framed the concept of computers and the Internet with a seemingly nonintuitive twist: These one-time engines of government and big business had transmogrified into a social force associated with egalitarianism, personal empowerment, and the nurturing cocoon of community." - Steven Levy, Bookforum "A revealing new book.... [Turner] is rigorous in his argument... and impressive in his range." - Edward Rothstein, New York Times "Turner's fascinating From Counterculture to Cyberculture... focuses on a key player whose role was making the counterculture-cyberculture connection: Stewart Brand.... There are a myriad of fascinating little historical details that [Turner] dug up that will surprise and enlighten even the key players in the drama." - Henry Lieberman, Science"
Product Description
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.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
This is the first attempt to tell the remarkable story of Stewart Brand - one of the most influential men of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. And it achieves it brilliantly.
The story is book-ended by two important publications - Tom Wolfe's Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test and Kevin Kelly's Wired magazine.
In the former, set in San Francisco in the mid 'sixties, Brand joined Ken Kesey's Merry Pranksters in their search for the alternative consciousness and sense of community provided by LSD and a variety of mind altering chemical and technological stimulants.
In the latter, the action moves out to the Bay Area and we see Brand, Kelly and the electro-hippies seeking their own escape from the hierarchies of control in what they saw as the coming digital utopia.
In between, Turner displays a masterful command of the popular culture and technological landscape that Brand so nimbly traversed. In one of the many excellent reviews this book receives on Amazon.com, someone describes Brand as 'Zelig-like'. Yet, in the Woody Allen movie, Zelig was an incidental observer at landmark events. Brand, however, was aways a major player - absorbing new ideas, seeking and making connections where none appeared to exist and, most importantly, making things happen.
From Kesey's bus to organising the Trips Festival that kicked off San Francisco's Summer of Love; from the breakthrough demonstration of the moveable mouse interface to the launch of The Whole Earth Catalog (which Steve Jobs described as the offline www); from WELL, the first real working computer network to the launch of Wired, Brand was at the very centre of events that have shaped our world.
Turner chronicles the extraordinary journey of this restless soul: the fortunes he gave away, the setbacks he suffered and the people he inspired. And Turner does it with a rare eye for detail and nice line in wry humour. Which means he is absolutely thorough (there are 27 pages of notes and 21 pages of bibliography) but never, ever dull.
Buy this book right now and learn about the man who, to this day, is trying to change the world we live in.
The story is book-ended by two important publications - Tom Wolfe's Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test and Kevin Kelly's Wired magazine.
In the former, set in San Francisco in the mid 'sixties, Brand joined Ken Kesey's Merry Pranksters in their search for the alternative consciousness and sense of community provided by LSD and a variety of mind altering chemical and technological stimulants.
In the latter, the action moves out to the Bay Area and we see Brand, Kelly and the electro-hippies seeking their own escape from the hierarchies of control in what they saw as the coming digital utopia.
In between, Turner displays a masterful command of the popular culture and technological landscape that Brand so nimbly traversed. In one of the many excellent reviews this book receives on Amazon.com, someone describes Brand as 'Zelig-like'. Yet, in the Woody Allen movie, Zelig was an incidental observer at landmark events. Brand, however, was aways a major player - absorbing new ideas, seeking and making connections where none appeared to exist and, most importantly, making things happen.
From Kesey's bus to organising the Trips Festival that kicked off San Francisco's Summer of Love; from the breakthrough demonstration of the moveable mouse interface to the launch of The Whole Earth Catalog (which Steve Jobs described as the offline www); from WELL, the first real working computer network to the launch of Wired, Brand was at the very centre of events that have shaped our world.
Turner chronicles the extraordinary journey of this restless soul: the fortunes he gave away, the setbacks he suffered and the people he inspired. And Turner does it with a rare eye for detail and nice line in wry humour. Which means he is absolutely thorough (there are 27 pages of notes and 21 pages of bibliography) but never, ever dull.
Buy this book right now and learn about the man who, to this day, is trying to change the world we live in.
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
12 reviews
89 of 93 people found the following review helpful
Solid scholarship, cogent argument
25 Sep 2006
Format:Hardcover
As the guy in the subtitle, I might be expected to have all kinds of eye-rolling cavils with Turner's book, but I don't. I'm impressed by the thoroughness of his research and his astonishingly accurate depiction of the many brief historical contexts in which his story unfolds. That is hard to do even for people who were there.
I'll add here one micro-correction that I gather Turner plans to fix in the paperback edition. In the early 1960s I was not a draftee in the Army, but an officer on two years active duty in the Infantry. If I at times took a leadership role later on, I was just deploying what I'd been trained to do.
The guy in the subtitle CAN'T give a book 5 stars--- it's impertinent. Hence my 4 stars.
I'll add here one micro-correction that I gather Turner plans to fix in the paperback edition. In the early 1960s I was not a draftee in the Army, but an officer on two years active duty in the Infantry. If I at times took a leadership role later on, I was just deploying what I'd been trained to do.
The guy in the subtitle CAN'T give a book 5 stars--- it's impertinent. Hence my 4 stars.
17 of 20 people found the following review helpful
An excellent record of an amazing life
26 Nov 2006
Format:Hardcover
Stewart Brand is a high-IQ Zelig, who has been a catalyst of so many important developments throughout the last 4 decades of the 20th century. This volume is more scholarly, and more revealing of the social forces at work, than Markoff's What the Dormouse Said. It focuses with great intensity on Brand, due to Turner's unique access to Brand's diaries in the Stanford Library. SB is shown to have been central to far more moments of incipient Renaissance than anyone since Lou Salome, friend of Nietzsche, Rilke and Freud: He joined Ken Kesey as an original Prankster, was the videographer for Engelbart's 'mother of all demos,' then linked up all kinds of communes (including Ant Farm) while founding and editing the Whole Earth Catalog. Besides all the events already mentioned, Turner dives deeply into the WELL, which was the primordial "virtual community", co-founded by Brand. With his vision of power as drawn from network affiliations, Brand then built a consulting company called the Global Business Network, which used scenario planning as a form of "corporate performance art", by fusing countercultural norms with the needs of corporate board rooms. Turner does a fairly good job posing critical questions about how the privileged white male perspective defined the unfolding story. He flags the problem of this privilege, but isn't able to concretely identify how it could have been solved. Read this book to learn how SB helped create the world we live in, and deployed his unique social entrepreneurial skills to stay in the center of the game.
9 of 10 people found the following review helpful
What one person can turn on within these vast systems within which we vibrate
26 Oct 2006
Format:Hardcover
Like one of his teachers and friends Buckminster Fuller, Stesart Brand is an archetypal example of the American individualist- inventor the man who Thoreau said ' hears the sound of his own drummer'. Paradoxically the super- individualist Brand is also perhaps the single person most responsible for making ordinary Americans connect with, show concern with the various systems cyber-systems, eco-systems, communications - systems we are moving within.
In this informed, detailed, and extremely well- written survey of the career of Brand, Fred Turner also provides a insightful and exciting look at America 's cultural, and especially 'alternative culture ' development from the sixties through the nineties. Brand meets up on his travels with 'Edge's' John Brockman, with Ken Kesey with whom he is a Merry Prankster, with Bucky Fuller who tries to help his projects,with Kevin Kelly of the 'Wired' world, with many of those seeking new ways of making the Technology connect with communal frameworks that will enable ( at least this is one of Brand's goals) the individual to truly be an individual .
Brand's most famous contribution 'The Whole Earth Catalogue' which was certainly one of the major cultural influences upon the Environmental Movement, and incidentally the Hippy Culture of the Sixties , told us the way we could get anything we needed to make our way into the rapidly changing future. Brand's work as editor and thinker also contributed to the World Wide Web to come, and the name and concept 'personal computer' is also one of his contributions.
This is an important work to read not only to learn about decisive moments in the life of a remarkable individual, but to better understand the world- in- the -making we are a part of.
In this informed, detailed, and extremely well- written survey of the career of Brand, Fred Turner also provides a insightful and exciting look at America 's cultural, and especially 'alternative culture ' development from the sixties through the nineties. Brand meets up on his travels with 'Edge's' John Brockman, with Ken Kesey with whom he is a Merry Prankster, with Bucky Fuller who tries to help his projects,with Kevin Kelly of the 'Wired' world, with many of those seeking new ways of making the Technology connect with communal frameworks that will enable ( at least this is one of Brand's goals) the individual to truly be an individual .
Brand's most famous contribution 'The Whole Earth Catalogue' which was certainly one of the major cultural influences upon the Environmental Movement, and incidentally the Hippy Culture of the Sixties , told us the way we could get anything we needed to make our way into the rapidly changing future. Brand's work as editor and thinker also contributed to the World Wide Web to come, and the name and concept 'personal computer' is also one of his contributions.
This is an important work to read not only to learn about decisive moments in the life of a remarkable individual, but to better understand the world- in- the -making we are a part of.
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