Lee Felsenstein
didn't go to Chicago for the Democratic National Convention in 1968.
He didn't make it to Chicago this year, either. Both times he had his
hands full as a revolutionary.
In 1968, "I remember that I was busy designing a prototype cardboard
riot helmet that could be self-manufactured on the spot in places like
Chicago," said Felsenstein, who, when he was not designing defensive
clothing, was writing for the underground newspaper The Berkeley Barb.
"I also had been analyzing proposals for jamming police radio."
This year, Felsenstein, who built some of the first personal
computers in the '70s, was busy with what he calls his side project:
computer-based community organizing. His regular job is developing new
types of information technology at Interval Research Corp. in Palo Alto,
Calif., and his passion is refurbishing obsolete computer hardware and
using it to help turn on communities that aren't tuned into the information
revolution.
As a respected elder of the hackers, the computer-obsessed members of
the counter culture, the 51-year-old Felsenstein is heeded when he makes
pronouncements. And he believes that the radicalism of the 1960s, which
was treated all last week in Chicago as a curious cultural artifact,
is actually closer than ever to realizing its goal of decentralizing
American political and economic power.
"Revolutions succeed when they replace the originators of
information," Felsenstein said. "We're placing the power of
information on a grass-roots level by designing tools without any handles,
tools for change that the power structures can't get their hands on.
That wasn't true with underground print or broadcast technology."
Self-described computer nerds like Felsenstein have carried the counter
culture's torch longer than most of the '60s radicals. While political
activists like Tom Hayden were drifting into elected office and groups
like the Weathermen and the Black Panthers were dying out, hackers were
busy converting some of the chieftains of the consciousness crowd, like
Timothy Leary and Stewart Brand, from LSD to http.
Brand, who started "The Whole Earth Catalogue" in 1968,
added "The Whole Earth Software Catalogue" in 1984. In an
E-mail interview, he observed that radicals "failed in such endeavors
as communes, new-left politics and drugs." Nonetheless, he believes
that the revolution is well under way. This revolution has its roots
not in the bloody streets of Chicago in 1968, but in the cluttered California
garages of computer zealots, who are still idealistic.
The radicals who survived, Brand noted, learned a tactical lesson from
history: studiousness and stealth are likely to outlive street protests.
"In 1972 I wrote an article for Rolling Stone titled 'Fanatic Life
and Symbolic Death Among the Computer Bums,' " he said. "There
wasn't another public report about hackers until Steve Levy's book 'Hackers'
10 years later. That's a measure of how overlooked the whole phenomenon
was until it was way too late for the world to contain it, or co-opt
it, or do anything but join it."
With no serious authority figures minding the medium, the Internet
developed its own set of rules, based on libertarian ideals like free
speech and the "gift economy," the exchange of information
and products free of charge. The counter culture also managed to get
its beliefs written into the very code of the Internet.
The Net, for instance, has a distaste for advertising, which reflects
its radical roots. And the non-hierarchical group called the Internet
Engineering Task Force, which continually constructs features of the
Internet, is, Felsenstein said, "anarchism in action."
"Human consciousness -- always a social agreement -- is taking
a sharp turn into something new with the Net," Brand said. "The
global, social impact of the Net revolution remains to be seen. Signs
are that it will be fast, deep and out of control, just the way we liked
things in the '60s."
Even if, in the minds of the computer faithful, the Internet
has supplanted communes, narcotics and the chaos of street protests,
Felsenstein still laments aspects of the revolution he helped start.
He is disappointed to see hackers straying from '60s ideals. For instance,
Felsenstein frowns on computer heavyweights like Bill Gates of Microsoft
for valuing profit over political action.
In fact, computing billionaires draw the ire of Felsenstein more than
any politician posing for the cameras. Why? Because they are more powerful
and because the roots of their fortunes lie in the radical computer
hacking of the 1960s.
"Today we don't have to ask permission of any politician to effect
change, we have to ask Bill Gates. The planned obsolesence of their
products that creates program bloating is designed for the benefit of
management only," Felsenstein said.
"There's no equivalent of the Vietnam War today," he
continued. "But Gates certainly could be Lyndon Johnson before
the '64 election. Everyone was very hopeful about him and then on election
night Johnson began planning the escalation in Vietnam."
Not all young computer wizards are viewed by Felsenstein as sellouts,
though. Bart Decrem is a 29-year-old employee of Plugged-In, a project
in East Palo Alto that provides residents with access to computers seven
days a week. Decrem's current project is instructing young people how
to reconfigure junked computers. Once the machines are refurbished,
Plugged-In plans to sell them to people in the community for less than
$100.
This undertaking is not so different from one Felsenstein began
23 years ago. In 1973, he founded the Community Memory Project to develop
a computerized town bulletin board. He made sure that computers would
be publicly available throughout Berkeley, and thus provided users with
everything from flea markets to personal ads.
"What Lee Felsenstein did with the Community Memory Project was
put public access terminals throughout Berkeley," Decrem said.
"We're doing the exact same thing -- using obsolete technology
to network the community. We're adopting his technology to empower people
even if they have old computers. Clinton and Gore talk about the national
information structure. This is the neighborhood information structure.
"We give computer classes to people going through drug recovery,"
he said. "We employ a graphics artist who was arrested in San Jose
for his graffiti. We call people like Lee Felsenstein secret agents
for the way they help us. Those folks were doing civil disobedience
30 years ago and we're doing the same thing now."
Felsenstein points to Decrem's group as an example of the revolution
that arises with affordable computer hardware and software. Both men
agree that the ideas of the '60s revolution have settled into a more
durable cultural evolution, one that is quiet and computer crazed, just
like the original hacker culture.
"I started out in my engineering career asking what qualifies as
nonviolent weapons to assist the civil rights struggle," Felsenstein
said. "And I'm peddling obsolete computers for grass-roots political
functions today. It's the same goal: to allow the world to take itself
over."