From Cyberculture to Counterculture

I'm reading Fred Turner's engaging, From Counterculture to Cyberculture, which tracks the influence of a certain breed of libertarian-leaning, cybernetics-influenced, Whole Earth Catalog-publishing hippie (personified by Whole Earth and Wired impresario Stewart Brand) on the computer industry. While I'm perfectly happy to acknowledge that the counterculture had a pronounced influence on the tech industry, I wonder what sort of audience would be interested in a book about the influence of starched and stodgy IBM engineers with 2.5 children, a slide rule, and a golden retriever. Probably no one, and because such a history is utterly uncool, even tho it may well have been the "dominant" influence, it remains oddly untold.

Contemporary tech people want the cultural caché derived from an association with the counterculture, especially as they themselves increasingly corporatized post-bubble-burst (the book was published in 2006, btw). As much as communalist-based organization techniques may have influenced some comp companies, just as many drew their structure from conventional business models and succeeded in spite of or even because of those decidedly un-hippie hierarchies. Turner's book -- and even more pointedly, Turner's book's success -- may say more about the desire to read the counterculture back into the history of cyberculture than on the counterculture's actual influence.