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"The truth is," wrote Theodore Roszak in From Satori to Silicon Valley, "if one probes
just beneath the surface of the bucolic hippie image, one finds a puzzling infatuation with
certain forms of ... technology reaching well back into the early sixties." In the spirit of
the inspirational Buckminster Fuller who spoke of "spaceship earth" and sought to write its
"operating manual," hippies sought a form of post-industrial, knowledge-based life largely
in harmony with the ecosystem. Many found a tool for this in computing.
"Fuller was not alone in extrapolating the technophiliac vision of postindustrial his-
tory," writes Roszak. "There were others, each of whom became, at some point, a counter-
cultural favorite. There was Marshall McLuhan, who saw the electronic media as the secret
of building a new 'global village' that was somehow cozy, participative, and yet at the same
time technologically sophisticated. There was Paolo Soleri, who believed that the solution
to the ecological crisis of the modem world was the building of megastructural 'arcologies'
- beehive cities in which the urban billions could be compacted into totally artificial envir-
onments. And there was Gerard O'Neill, who barnstormed the country whipping up enthu-
siasm for one of the most ambitious schemes of all: the launching of self-contained space
colonies for the millions. For a few years, O'Neill became a special fascination of Stewart
Brand, founder of The Whole Earth Catalog (later The Co-Evolution Quarterly ). In each of
these cases, one sees the same assumption brought into play: the industrial process, pushed
to its limit, generates its own best medicine. Out of the advanced research of the electron-
ics, plastics, chemical, and aerospace industries, there emerge solutions to all our political
and environmental problems."
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