There are some very interesting posts going around that are starting to touch on something that became very apparent to me yesterday ’“ history is repeating itself. Normally I consider my parents a lost-cause when it comes to social media and web 2.0, but this weekend my father blew me away with some off-hand comments about what I had thought were the latest in innovative ’2.0 thinking’ and architecture.
When my father was younger he was a hippie — one of many. My dad was so swayed by the ideas of the then ‘counterculture’ that he packed up his bags and hitchhiked to the epicenter of hippie counterculture activity; San Francisco. Here is where it gets interesting. While my generation often assumes our parents were simply out smoking dope and tossing Frisbees, it turns out that much of the 1960′s movement was rooted in the same concepts we are talking about now in the 2.0 space: social networks, community building, and innovative technology (gasp!).
Specifically my father mentioned the Whole Earth Catalog a publication he likened to a Google; a publication to help “find inspiration and shape one’s own customized environment.” Well, doing some research into this — some other notables have made the same connection (see end of speech). Not only that, but the Catalog was founded by Stewart Brand the creator of the first online community called Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link (or The WELL). What’s more, Stewart’s partner-in-crime was author Kevin Kelly who also happens to be founding editor of Wired Magazine. Oh and all this happened in Cali. Thus when Fred Wilson states in relation to California, I felt that Kurt was writing about today instead of 150 years ago’ he knows what he’s talking about.
So my father is out in California at the epicenter of all this community building. As the viral philosophies spread, events like Woodstock which attracted 500,000+ (makes Burning Man look like a joke) came to inspire a nation of young people who thought they could design a better culture of open communications in the face of oppressive politics. Wow, sound familiar?
Listen to this classic 1960′s rhetoric:
“Today, working hard is about taking apparent risk. It’s hard work to tell your boss that he’s being intellectually and emotionally lazy. As the economy plods along, many of us are choosing to take the easy way out. We’re going to work for the Man, letting him do the hard work while we work the long hours [we must take risks] Not a crazy risk like betting the entire company on an untested product. No, an apparent risk: something that the competition believe is unsafe but that you realize is far more conservative than sticking with the status quo.”
Wrong! That was written yesterday on a blog by none other than Seth Godin!
The thing I find particularly interesting is that while in the 60′s many of these same concepts existed, they were absent a monetizable model. However in 2007, thanks to the internet and 2.0 tools, finance people can monetize all this revolutionary talk and entrepreneurs can act on it. Still, the underlying themes are extremely similar.
So what happened to those crazy hippies? What happened to my dad?
Well my father certainly kept up his notions of community building, but did so from a non-tech and non-profit standpoint.
What about the merry pranksters? Well, Stewart Brand now lives on a Tugboat in Sausalito and is surrounded by a hand-picked crop of innovative intellectual geniuses (“remarkable people“) at the Global Business Network — an organization that may answer Brad Feld’s questions as to the whereabouts of Galt’s Gulch. The best part is that these guys are not yet done with their revolutionizing. Through the Long Now Foundation the former hippies work on more modest goals: “We hope to creatively foster responsibility in the framework of the next 10,000 years.”
…And here we are in 2007 thinking history ‘repeating itself’ only applies to bubbles…
Love it! Thanks Dad!
More to come!
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