Redefining Reality - The Intellectual Implications of Modern Science

engineers used their technological expertise and equipment to
create psychedelic light shows for local rock concerts. Often, the
rock musicians would allow their concerts to be recorded by the
audience and, later, replicated and distributed.
This led to an interesting line of thought: If Wiener is right
and everything is information, then everything could be
stored on tape, replicated, and distributed. If rock bands
were freely allowing the information from their shows to be
promulgated, then shouldn’t computer data also be free—and
freely accessible?
In this view, individuals might have their own computers, but
they would form a network, a digital commune, with no sense
of independent ownership of programs or data.
From this San Francisco–area group of hippie computer pioneers
came Apple computers, spreadsheets, word processing, the computer
mouse, e-mail, computer music and graphics—everything we
now associate with
computers. The result is
a completely different
picture of the world.
Indeed, in some ways,
the Internet has created
a completely new world
unto itself. Where the
founders hoped it would
augment us as real people
in the real world, it has
actually allowed us to
become different people
in a different world.
© LDProd/iStock/Thinkstock.
247