What the Dormouse Said

Computing went from being dismissed as a tool of bureaucratic control to being embraced as a symbol of individual expression and liberation. The evolution of the perception of the computer mirrored other changes in the world at large.

Theodore Roszak has advanced a similar argument in From Satori to Silicon Valley (1986), a monograph that traces the rise of the personal-computer industry to countercultural values of the period.

argued in his essay “We Owe It All to the Hippies” that “the counterculture’s scorn for centralized authority provided the philosophical foundations of not only the leaderless Internet but also the entire personal-computer revolution.”1