prior probability recently stumbled upon this perceptive quote by Stewart Brand, editor of the “Whole Earth Catalog”, comparing and contrasting the “power to the people” culture at Berkeley in the late 1960s with the more entrepreneurial, start-up culture at Stanford around the same time:
Around Berkeley, it was the Free Speech Movement, “power to the people.” Around Stanford, it was the “Whole Earth Catalog,” Steve Wozniak, Steve Jobs, people like that, and they were just power to people. They just wanted to power anybody who was interested, not “the people.” Well, it turns out there is no, probably, “the people.” So the political blind alley that Berkeley went down was interesting. We were all taking the same drugs, the same length of hair, but the stuff came out of the Stanford area, I think because it took a Buckminster Fuller access-to-tools angle on things.
This quote appears in an essay by Evgeny Morozov in the January 13th, 2014 issue of The New Yorker (page 70, to be more precise). Considering their geographical and demographic proximity, what explains this difference in cultures at Stanford and Berkeley in the 1960s?
