The Digital Counter-culture - Digital Culture - page 108

36 Visual display of a
Mandelbrot set, or fractal.

strongly advocated a free market, against the prevailing Keynesian
belief in state intervention. Advocacy of capitalism in any form
might seem hard to square with counter-cultural aspirations (espe-
cially with the hindsight of some years of the application of such

ideas by Thatcher, Reagan et al). In fact the kind of radical measures
proposed by Friedman were not so far from ideas advocated by
the libertarian element within the counter-culture, especially in their
shared respect for notions of individualism. Furthermore, central
to neo-liberal economics was the conception of the market as a
spontaneously ordered institution, rather than the product of intel-
ligent design. This was first put forward in the early '

30

s by Friedrich
von Hayek, who worked with, and greatly influenced, Friedman.
The beginnings of computer-oriented study of spontaneous order
in the '

60

s must have reinforced arguments for spontaneous order in
areas such as economics.

70

computing and the counter-culture

As well making Cybernetics safe for the counter-culture, The Whole
Earth Catalog also helped to create the context in which the personal
computer was realized, and in which interactive multimedia became
available as a consumer product. The counter-culture opened up
a space in which the personal computer could be developed. The