What is "Hippie" in Silicon Valley?

All that 'hippie' ceramics neatly positioned on a store-bought case. I would have expected to see a beanbag and 'bricks and boards'. Tsk, tsk. 1980s Greens in Europe are a long ways away from 1960s 'free love' swimming au naturale off some beach on a Greek island. 'Hippies' 'turn on, tune in, and drop out'. University degree? Give me a break. I was 14 years old in 1968, and I visited a relative living in Hashbury (as it was called) in the 1960s. I found the place frightening. The first thing to keep in mind is that boomers are coming of age in the mid-1960s - if one was born in 1946 then they turned 18 in 1964. This is right about the time that Lyndon Johnson began escalating the war in Viet Nam. Much of the greater LA area was in the aerospace business, some of it commercial, some of it space, some of it defense, and some of it 'black'. A lot of highly educated parents couldn't tell their kids what they were doing. This by itself is a good way of inciting paranoia. Seeing oil rigs in Monterrey Bay and cars dripping oil on freeways and the LA smog was stomach turning. American kids would graduate from high school and get marched off to the Army before they were old enough to vote. This was a huge pile of 'dry tinder', and it exploded. What was going on in 1968 in the Bay Area, however, was 'too late' - by then people were rushing in from all around the country, and the entire atmosphere had been destroyed. What was really 'hippie' was an aesthetic that ran back to the Bohemians of the 1950s, filtered down to those that lived in the West Coast from about 1964 to 1967. These people moved 'out' - to northern California or New Mexico or Oregon just as the media was hyping everything and people were showing up from Timbuktu. What happened from there was more degenerate than the behavior of the original actors - a lot of drugs, plenty of political protest, and record-racks of music. It all pretty much petered out with the oil embargo and Nixon resignation. People that were 18 in 1964 were 27 in 1973, and it was time to get on with life. There is no doubt that California was 'counter-culture' in the late 1970s and 1980s when computers became 'personal'. This should not be mistaken for 'hippies'. The tech business was paving over the orchards and vineyards that hippies inhabited - these are people growing their own food, tending a goat and some chickens, and generating electricity with a car alternator and some wooden blades on a telephone pole. What is 'left-wing' in Europe is in reaction to an establishment that has existed for centuries longer than Europeans have been in the New World, much less California. They aren't in a state of revolt over CIA involvement in Chile, they're revolting from primogeniture, an institution that tracks back (in various forms) to the ancient Egyptians. Someone starting a 'hippie culture' Internet portal in the 1990s would have been a child of 'hippies' born in the late 1940s or 1950s. Creating computer software in an air-conditioned cubicle in an industrial park is in another galaxy from the ways 'hippies' think and live.

You brought a smile to my face. Like you, I was born too late to be a part of the hippie movement, but can distinctly recall its impact on my youth. And having grown up in the Los Gatos area, I am very familiar with the birth of Silicon Valley. Today you made me remember days of my youth. Thank you!

Hippies were and are over-privileged white kids who have yet to realise that the world does not revolve around them. Their self-regard is so staggering that they cannot grasp that what makes their thoughts / creations / etc exceptional is not their freedom, brilliance, originality, profundity, etc, but their deep, and abiding, puerility. When hippies grow up, they become parents of yet more over-privileged white kids, and spend their time complaining bitterly about what a bunch of slackers they are.