The American tradition of scientists and engineers keeping a professional and physical distance from politics and the military ended when Hitler invaded Poland in late summer of 1939. In 1940, Vannevar Bush, a professor and administrator at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), recommended President Franklin Roosevelt create an agency for coordinating the research of the civilian scientific and engineering community with the work of the military.

Over the duration of the war, the Office of Scientific Research and Development distributed approximately $450 million dollars in contracts to civilians for development of war-technologies. Universities like Harvard, the California Institute of Technology, and MIT were enlisted along with General Electric, Westinghouse, RCA and DuPont into a wartime effort to defeat the Axis. A robust military-industrial complex was firmly established.

In spite of the urgency of the war, a rigid form of command over research was not put in place. What did emerge was a system characterized by flexible collaboration within a unique nonhierarchical style of management. Managers and scientists, colonels and engineers mingled, socialized, partied and collaborated in new, interdisciplinary networks that ultimately brought forth radar, the atomic bomb, submarines and digital computers.

The detonation of a nuclear bomb by the Soviet Union in 1949 shattered America’s sense of invulnerable superiority. Overnight a new superpower arrived with the capability of destroying American cities. Early warning of such an attack required relaying information from all U.S. radar installations to one central location for analysis and interpretation. Those same interdisciplinary networks of military, industrial, and academic experts employed during the war now devised the Semi-automatic Ground Environment (SAGE). Central within SAGE was the Whirlwind computer developed by MIT professor Jay Forrester. Whirlwind became the coordinating and controlling “brain” of the North American Aerospace Defense Command, NORAD.

In response to the successful launch of the Soviet Space Satellite in 1957, President Eisenhower ordered the creation of the Advanced Research Project Agency. Sometimes referred to as DARPA for Defense Advanced Research Project Agency. Its’ teams collaborated to reestablish and maintain technological superiority on earth and in space. By the mid-60s DARPA was conceiving and experimenting with ways to communicate computer to computer.

The convivial society of these free-thinking collaborative think tanks that imagined and designed these machines of war rested atop an otherwise highly regimented bureaucracy of diligent mid-level managers, technicians and military staff. Reflecting the bureaucracy, Americans moved in locked conformity, like bees in a hive. A monotonous drumbeat of Cold War propaganda instilled paranoia and suspicion, while the new technology of television stimulated mindless consumerism. A nervous people were becalmed by the immediate gratification of things. The Beats were the first to articulate a countercultural alternative.

Alan Ginsberg became the poet laureate of the Beatniks. He held the established culture responsible for the “robotization of mentality.” A full-blown counterculture grew up in the footsteps of Ginsberg, Kerouac, William Burroughs and company. It came of age in 1962 when the Port Huron Statement announced the arrival of the New Left. In 1964 students at the University of California at Berkeley demonstrated in demand for free speech. By 1967, the hippies, the music, LSD, and the transcendental call of Zen Buddhism culminated in a back-to-the-land explosion of communes far removed from the white-bread preoccupations of mainstream America.

Between 1965 and 1972 thousands of communes sprang up coast to coast. A multitude of independent communes subscribed to the possibility of a new way of being. Existing in communion with the natural environment together with mind-expanding experiences offered a path to tranquility and enlightenment. These young men and women hoped to create a world without top-down management, cutthroat competition for money and status, or existential loneliness.

There existed within the communalists those who saw information itself as a means to enlightenment. Like plows and saws, seeds and compost, knowledge itself was a tool. In the fall of 1968, Stewart Brand, a biologist by training and an icon of the counterculture by what Jimi Hendrix called “experience”, published The Whole Earth Catalog. It was self-described simply as “access to tools.”

In its scope and premise the Whole Earth Catalog cordoned off an area for useful information relevant to mind, body and spirit. Grounded in sustainable environmentalism, it worked as a clearinghouse for sharing ideas simple and profound. It embraced the possibilities of a humanistic technology.

Simultaneous with the counterculture of the 60s and the founding of the Whole Earth Catalog, the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency continued developing interactive computer networks. J. C. R. Licklider was a psychologist and computer scientist who had worked on the SAGE project during the 50s.

In 1960, while working at the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency, Licklider proposed the possibility of connecting the computers of the military, industrial, and academic complex to several mainframes to maintain contact in the event of a nuclear assault.

Though prompted by doomsday scenarios, Licklider nevertheless saw the computer as more than a instrument of war. He believed his same ideas for a defensive network could transfer to interactive personal computer networks bound by shared interests and unbounded by location. In his memos he discussed the concept of an Intergalactic Computer Network, which even envisioned what we now call “the Cloud.”

Licklider’s biographer described him as a man, who “has seen a future in which computers will empower individuals, instead of forcing them into rigid conformity. He is almost alone in his convictions that computers can become not just superfast calculating machines, but joyful machines: tools that will serve as new media of expression, inspirations to creativity, and gateways to a vast world of online information.”

Meanwhile, government funded research steadily pushed the envelope, first by connecting computers within a network, then by connecting one network to another, until by the 1970s computers around the country could communicate online.

In 1985 Stewart Brand and his associates at the Whole Earth Catalog took the concept of technology in the service of humanity online by setting up the WELL, the Whole Earth Lectronic Link.

In late 1991 the English computer scientist, Tim Berners-Lee, introduced his invention of the World Wide Web. With its’ navigable hypertext links, the World Wide Web made real the ideas previously conceived in the collaborative environments of military think tanks and imagined in the nonhierarchical communes of the counterculture.

J.C.R. Licklider, who traveled the corridors of MIT and the Pentagon, was kindred with visionaries like Stewart Brand, who traveled down the road on Ken Kesey’s magic bus. If there is anything joyful to celebrate about the Cold War, it is that somehow out of the fear of nuclear annihilation there developed an open convivial environment where all people have access to all people beyond interference and censorship of the dominant military industrial complex.

At a commencement speech at Stanford University in 2005 Steve Jobs said, “When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation.... It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along. It was idealistic and overflowing with neat tools and great notions."