Here's an interesting read from Christopher Hitchens on hippies:

Eleanor Agnew's lovely memoir of this movement of primal innocence is at once honest and hilarious. She recaptures the period with unerring skill: a period when the Apollo mission had shown us our fragile, blue planetary home from outer space, thus promoting (first) ''The Whole Earth Catalog'' and (second) a mentality that despised the science and innovation necessary for the taking of that photograph in the first place.

RTWT

Interesting.

I was actually there -- the San Francisco Bay Area in the late 1960s. I was even a bit of a participant. But, mixed in with my fervid opposition to the war was an equally intense enthusiasm for science and technology.

I don't know where others -- Hitchens, Agnew, etc. -- were during that era. The reality was different from the stereotype of today. Quite a few of us, while enthusiastic about science and technology, were less than impressed with the increasing bureaucratization of these fields. We saw, dimly perhaps, that this process would have bad results. Today we have a NASA that is starting to grasp the necessity of reform -- and the growth of entrepreneurs that might break the grip of that dysfunctional bureaucracy. Both groups have something in common with the old hippies. That's especially true of those of us who managed to keep our heads and not fall prey to the monsters who always go after nascent experiments in freedom.

Marxism -- even in the U.S. -- was fundamentally hostile to the hippie phenomenon. Earnest Marxists managed to take over the Midpeninsula Free University -- one of those hippie experiments. When that happened, though, the whole thing collapsed. Hippies had far better sense than to follow Marxists. To me it's no surprise that Havel identified so much with the hippie crowd.

Hippies, like most humans, got some things right and some things wrong. To me it's interesting that Dale Amon and I (two people who really did participate in the hippie movement) have so much in common -- from our enthusiasm about technology to common themes in our political and social views.

My impression of the hippies is that they were not anti-technology, per se. Rather, they correctly pointed out that technology at the time was largely the tool of large centralized institutions (e.g. government, big coroporations, the MIC) and, therefor, was the enemy of the bottom-up. decentralized social structures that they were in favor of.

Remember that at this time, computers were big monstrosities that used reel to reel tape and were used by large corporations. It wasn't until the apple computer came out that computing power was put in the hands of the lone individual.

Unlike the luddites of today, the hippies had a rational distrust of technology in the manner of how it was used at the time.

Please do not be unfairly harsh on the hippies. They actually had very little to do with Marxism. There is a book written by one of the founders of the Hell's Angels that vividly described the differences between Berkeley and the scene at Haight-Ashbury. The two melius could not have been more different.

Hey, the Luddites (the original ones) also had a rational distrust of technology, in particular the technology that was eliminating their jobs. Being without employment was far worse then than it is today.