A look back at past perceptions of society, culture, community, and social ethics?
How Culture Drives Behaviours
by Julien S. Bourrelle | TEDxTrondheim
Julien argues how we see the World through a cultural perspective. By changing our perspective we can change the way we interpret the World. Julien is the founder of Mondå, a project that helps Norwegians benefit from cultural diversity while supporting talented foreigners to adapt and connect with Norway.
He is educated as an astronautical engineer and is currently completing a doctoral degree in Norway. He is originally from Canada and speaks English, Norwegian, French and Spanish. He has been active in higher education policy at the European level, at the national level in Norway and locally at different institutions. He became the first foreign board member of the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU).
Other positions include the Norwegian national research committee (UHR), the board of the national Norwegian doctoral organisation and the presidency of NTNU’s doctoral organisation. This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community.
Learn more at http://ted.com/tedx
Hippies Change a Generation – Decades TV Network
The 1960s brought us the hippies—a younger generation who rebelled against their parents, community and government. It was a counterculture mantra of “turn on, tune in and drop out.” Flower power, marijuana and advocacy for communal living was the order of the day. Hippie culture reached its peak of influence and visibility at the Woodstock music festival in 1969.
“The Hippie Temptation” (1967)
Originally broadcast on August 22, 1967 as the inaugural edition of the short-lived CBS News series “Who, What, Where, When, Why.”
Sadhguru on Hippie Culture and the 1960s Generation
Sadhguru looks at what went right and what went wrong with the generation that came of age during the 1960s, and wanted to change the world.
#Sadhguru Yogi, mystic and visionary, Sadhguru is a spiritual master with a difference. An arresting blend of profundity and pragmatism, his life and work serves as a reminder that yoga is a contemporary science, vitally relevant to our times.
The History Of The Hippie Cultural Movement
The hippie cultural movement was an influential cultural movement that originated in the early 1960s and became a major international collective as it grew in popularity and size. Today, the term ‘hippie‘ is often used as a derogatory term and continues to be a complicated term that is often used to isolate various left-leaning parties or groups. In this brief article, we will explain how the hippie movement started and explain some of the major events and people that helped define the incredibly important international movement.
The Times They Are A-Changin’
To many, the American hippie is often seen as a direct result of the various national and international struggles that defined the 1950s. The mammoth disaster that was the Korean War (1950-1953) kicked off the ‘idyllic’ era of the 1950s and continued with the groundbreaking and terrifying hydrogen bomb test in 1954. The African-American Civil Rights Movement also started in the middle of the 1950s and culminated in events such as Brown V. Board (1954) and the integration of Little Rock Central High School in 1957. Along with these developments, technology was rapidly advancing as the Soviets sent the satellite Sputnik I into space in 1957 and started the billion-dollar space race between the two rival superpowers. Along with this, the 1950s were also defined by major events like the Cuban Revolution of 1959 and the failed Hungarian Revolt of 1956. Although many have the preconception that the 1950s were a perfect post-war paradise, they were actually as rocky as the 1960s and single-handedly helped spawn the hippie movement that we know today.
On The Road: The Beat Generation
Often seen as the precursor to the hippie movement of the 1960s, the Beat Generation was primarily a group of young writers who explored the strange cultural shifts in post-World War II America. The Beat Generation was one of America’s first counter-culture movements and embraced drug use, liberal sexuality and obscenity in their writings and works. Authors such as Ginsberg, Burroughs and Kerouac were some of the most famous Beat writers and were often the center of American controversy over literary censorship and obscenity. Many writers from the Beat Generation met at Columbia University but mostly ended up on the West Coast in places like San Francisco and Big Sur. Although the Beat Generation was mostly a literary movement, it has been long studied as a movement that heavily influenced the musically charged hippie movement.
Acid Tests: Ken Kesey and The Merry Pranksters
One of the groups that have been labeled as the ‘first’ major hippie group was Ken Kesey (of One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest fame) and The Merry Pranksters. Kesey has often been seen as the major link between the late Beat Movement and the early hippies of the 1960s. Kesey and The Merry Pranksters were a large community of like-minded people in California and Oregon who took epic road trips and traveled in a brightly colored school bus while ingesting large amounts of LSD, which was legal until 1965. The group traveled the nation, housed famous parties, gave out large quantities of LSD and helped define the long hair and bizarre fashion that came to symbolize the American hippie. One of the major events that established the Merry Pranksters in American society was the so-called ‘Acid Tests’ where large groups would drink Kool-Aid laced with LSD and attempt to experience a community-oriented trip. The group was also famous for its experiences with the Hells Angel Motorcycle Gang and The Grateful Dead.
Get The Hell Out Of Vietnam
The Vietnam War was a near 20-year conflict of massive proportions which helped propel the hippie movement into mainstream American consciousness. In the mid-1960s, the United States Government started a huge military surge wherein large qualities of American troops were sent to Vietnam to destabilize and destroy the communist North Vietnamese government, which was supported by the Soviet Union and China. Originally, the war was somewhat popular, but the seemingly never-ending conflict strained the American populace who were getting more and more frustrated with the tremendous loss of life and crazed politics of the war. After some time, large protests of students, veterans and hippies started to erupt everywhere (including internationally) and slowly twisted the average American’s view of the Vietnam conflict. The American hippie became famous for their influence in the widespread Vietnam protests and helped to define their role in the tumultuous 1960s.
Flower Children
The summer of 1967, or the ‘Summer of Love,’ has often been referred to as one of the most important widespread social and political gatherings in recent American history. During the famous summer, over 100,000 people convened and relocated to the Haight-Ashbury District of San Francisco. Although many people mostly remember the ‘Summer of Love’ taking place in San Francisco, hippies actually convened in most major cities in America, Canada and Europe. The San Francisco summer is often remembered best because it was the cultural center of the hippie movement where free love, drug use and communal living became the norm. This period of time also helped spawn the ubiquitous ‘flower children’ that became a major American symbol in the 1960s. Many historians have reclassified the ‘Summer of Love’ as a major social experiment wherein people from all over congregated to question the social spheres and practices in which they grew up.
An Aquarian Exposition: 3 Days of Peace & Music
For many hippies and children of the 1960s, the original Woodstock Festivalin 1969 was the culmination of years of experimentation and changing social practices. Originally billed as ‘An Aquarian Exposition: 3 Days of Peace & Music,’ the Woodstock Music & Art Fair was a four-day festival comprised of 400,000 people on a dairy farm in rural New York State. The festival, which was originally planned as being three days long, drew people from all over the world and was a major point of controversy as the festival was almost shut down. A multitude of famous artists performed at the concert and included Santana, The Grateful Dead, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Janis Joplin, Sly and The Family Stone, The Who, Jefferson Airplane and Jimi Hendrix. Jimi Hendrix’s famous psychedelic performance of ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ became one of the most famous moments of the entire festival and helped to cement the hippie movement as a deeply political group that strived to rethink general society and its constraints on the average person.
There’s probably not a person in the world that doesn’t associate Silicon Valley with major technological enterprise – most of us associate the area with big-time tech developers like Google and Apple.
But what was happening before the business-focused tech boom to make it fertile ground for so much activity in the 1990s and 2000s? Here we’ll explore a little bit of the history of the era and how it came to be such a hotbed of innovation.
The Summer of Love
The late 60s in San Francisco was about more than sex, drugs, and rock and roll.This was a time that was about protesting and revolution, an explosion of music, and new forms of art, all of which represented extremely liberal ways of thinking and being. This was about breaking out of the status quo and finding new forms of freedom and self-reliance.
But it was not just rebellion; the entire hippie movement was born out of a need to break away from industrial-capitalist America which had come to dominate every aspect of life, particularly in the previous few centuries. In this, free speech was connected to civil rights, and anti-war protests prevailed with the start of the Vietnam War.
Counterculture Influences
On the surface, the hippie movement may have appeared hedonistic, but at its core, it was about creating new ways of living. This included creating your own tools and living systems that were not reliant on capitalist systems.
This focus on self-reliance and freedom of expression took on a variety of forms: it may have taken the form of creating a communal living space; it may have looked like escaping to the desert on an LSD trip, or it may have involved hacking together oddball vehicles out of scavenged materials. DIY technology was a part of this, and the concept of accessible digital technology and communities were starting to be discussed by locals coming out of Berkeley and Stanford.
The 1970s saw a combination of tech hobbyists who were focused on essentially creating their own computers. The Homebrew Computer Club met regularly to discuss this type of DIY tech as well as ways of making computers accessible to the masses. These meetings eventually gave rise to the Wozniak-Jobs creation of the first Apple computer.
The first personal computer was developed in the interest of liberation and freedom, and at that time Jobs and Wozniak were focused on getting others involved in DIY culture as well.
DIY Culture
The 1960s and 70s fueled new ways of thinking, and a part of this was also about new ways of living which included community living and utopias.
Sometimes these ideas included unusual architectural structures like Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic domes which started to pop up around Northern California. Such “bubble-shaped”organic structures were DIY concepts meant to support a more communal and possibly nomadic lifestyle. And plenty of San Franciscans in this era did move to rural communes to experiment with new ways of living at the time.
Today, both Apple and Google have buildings with circular, organic shapes reminiscent of 60s sci-fi movies. Circles and “bubbles” were symbolic of anti-capitalism at the time, as was seen in many design elements. This was just one symbolic way that people started to think differently, incorporate more ecological principles and holistic design, and which was reflected in buildings and art.
Steve Jobs for one was a fan ofThe Whole Earth Catalog, a counterculture publication that ran between 1968 and 1972. Jobs quoted the words from the last issue in his Stanford 2005 graduation speech– “Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.” Stewart Brand, who started the magazine, did so in the spirit of a more socially and organically cohesive American culture, including design. The phrase was meant to drive innovation and never second-guess your ideas, no matter how strange or outlandish they may seem at the time.
Disruptive Thinking
The Bay area is now full of startups and the world’s best tech specialists in the world, as well as some of the richest people in the world. While this can be traced back to the focus on innovation and risk-taking which began in the 1960s. This also gave way to the sharing economy and crowdsourcing, two concepts that arose out of this area during the 1960s and 70s.
The area became known as a place that welcomed unusual thinking – and it stuck.
In the 1960s in Silicon Valley, there were plenty of other tech companies doing their thing in inexpensive warehouses alongside venture capitalists who were then easily able to fund the computer industry into the 1980s, with software alongside of it. Having well-known schools like Stanford and Berkeley is key to having intellectual talent as a core of this perpetual stream of the brightest minds.
Generally, Silicon Valley started out by being a welcoming place for those who thrive on taking intellectual risks and experimenting with different ways of life. By contrast, other well-known business-centers in the US (such as Wall Street) have tended to stick more to the status quo. So even though now California is decidedly much richer in comparison to where it was in the hippie era, the people who populate it are still all about doing things differently.
If we think of the ways that current companies have disrupted the status quo — like how Facebook changed the face of communications, or how Salesforce upset the status quo of customer relationship technology – we can still see this happening.
Is there still a counterculture?
Into the 1990s and early 2000s, Silicon Valley saw the creation of the internet as well as associated startups like Amazon and Craigslist. The dot-com bubble in the late 1990s drew investors and pushed real estate prices to generally unaffordable levels. Despite the boom-bust cycle around that time it remains a rich hub of R&D and startups.
Steve Jobs was clearly influenced by counterculture initially, and while his intentions may have been to enlighten society and allow them to live more independently, the fact is that now we’re overly-attached to these machines. The debate rages on as to whether or not they have actually provided the freedom that was originally intended or if we’re more immersed and reliant on external forces.