kip/bot/blog

I hadn’t realized it, but I (and several friends) have been seriously burned out and depressed about the web and interactive. It’s all becoming un-fun: advertisers are doing stunts on wikipedia, youTube is talking about pre-rolls, broadband is a reprieve for advertising dinosaurs to limp along post-internet-meteor, and there are advertisements in games that I pay $50 for (isn’t that enough to pay to be left alone?). Looking back, I think, I’ve been in a funk for well over a year.

Well, Stewart Brand is here to save the day. Not today’s Stewart Brand, but the Stewart Brand of the late 60s early 70s and as described by Fred Turner, author of From CounterCulture to Cyberculture (amazon link, NYT Select link), a killer book on a gazillion levels.

I could blog for a week on this book, there’s so much to look at: a 60s legacy independent of baby boomer politicians, the overlooked importance of Buckminster Fuller’s thinking about design, some of the great books that were written, how outside of the New Left Kesey was. But for now, what has just struck me, like a lightning bolt, is how the Whole Earth crew saw possibilities everywhere. I’m sitting here lamenting the intrusion of marketing into my precious internet and pronouncing doom, but these guys looked at massive, massively ugly, slow, impossible to use computers and saw: possibility! I mean look at this picture:

How cool that they could look at this box and then decide to shoot it in the middle of a western desert, their symbol of adventure/frontier/possibility?

More to the point, though, these Whole Earth guys were hanging out with military-industrial computer wonks and reverse coopting that stuff into their nascent counter-culture. Time to get over the lament of advertisers and just step ahead of them again with my own stuff. Meanwhile, this book is insanely great.