I Miss the Post-Hippie Techno Utopianism of 90s Silicon Valley

August 15, 2026 - 4 minutes read - 762 words

When I got my first dial-up internet account, dialing a modem into an SCO Unix system (System V, based off of Unix 3.2), I started researching the tools and technology of the era.

It looked something like this after the modems finished singing.

There were also magazines hyping up the nascent internet culture like Mondo 2000 and Wired.

But both Mondo and Ed Krol’s Internet book cited the WELL, the “Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link,” as being an important something. It as something more than a BBS (bulletin board system) by terms of its cultural impact, and it was also an accelerant to (what we now think of) as the guardrail-free internet. Eventually I realized that “Whole Earth” was a thing, an ethos, an idea. And that idea manifested in a literal catalog as well as digital community.

Thus I came to understand the “Whole Earth” thing’s progenitor, Stewart Brand, as being somehow a guy into tents and a guy into computers at the same time.¹ “Whole Earth” was where a love of survival gear, camping equipment, and (not-too-subtle) hydroponics hardware intersected post-Sixties Californian identity.

The WELL, then, was a Kryptonian ark carrying a certain vintage San Francisco/Marin County culture out to the wider universe. It met me in proto-internet culture in 1992 and it had been baked into the tech landscape that emerged from the Berkeley-Stanford-San Francisco triangle in the 1980s-1990s.

But it was also baked into some of the people who grew up under or were pulled to the sway of those ideals, not least of whom Steven P. Jobs and Bill Atkinson. Emissaries of the “Whole Earth” ideal were still afoot (while their age of Aquarius was fading) when I reached the Bay in 2000.

I see none of their ilk left there today. I miss them. We are worse off for their absence.

Here’s Atkinson:

I imagine Atkinson riding out his lysergic high in a park under those glorious South Bay stars. I wonder whether the breeze bore the faint scent of Gilroy garlic to him. I wonder whether the rustle of the orange, apple, or cherry trees of Santa Clara County embraced him as he imagined delving for knowledge — no, not knowledge, wisdom through these new “bicycles for the mind” called computers.

Keep in mind: this is the genius who had just figured out how to cram a graphical user interface into the Macintosh. He could have been thinking about bitmapped icons or higher-resolution fonts. Or he could have been thinking about monetization strategies.

Instead, he asked himself a bigger, more humane question — how do we increase understanding? How do we increase peace? How do we move this species forward?

I have a hard time imagining any religious figure, let along governmental figure, let alone business figure even thinking about those ideals these days. Yet when I moved there in the early 2000s, those winds still echoed as luffing breezes in the culture.

In my time, you could still smell the last few orchards up and down El Camino. Instead of condos named for orchards, there were still real orchards. I didn’t realize at the time that I was watching the end of an era, but of course no one ever does.

I remember rolling through Sunnyvale, Cupertino, and Santa Clara. Those were the streets that the young, adopted, half-Syrian boy walked barefoot, headed toward a stint in India, a destiny of mock-turtlenecks, and the letter i as prefix to everything.

Those folks seem so patently gentle to me now. They seem so strange compared to the barely-human, profit-chasing sharks of Meta that serve dysmorphia to young girls with a side of eating disorder. They seem so far from the union-busting of young Uber; they seem so restrained next to the unhinged chainsaw-wielding of DOGE or its training ground, X, née Twitter.

We failed somewhere along the way: we stopped asking how we do something for the species instead of merely doing something for our own pocket. Even now, expert long-term thinkers suck up to the narcissistic kings of short-term thinking in hopes of lining their cash vault sufficiently to ride out the apocalypse in Kauaii while the plebs turn feral.

I miss those who wanted to share wisdom.

Footnotes

If that seems like a contradiction, you don’t get the Bay Area — specifically the Bay on the other side of the Golden Gate Bridge. It’s in hippies that take titrating LSD precursors very seriously; it’s in people very serious about environmental protection hiking with microcontrollers to keep hidden cannabis grow farms properly hydrated.