History Analysis / NewAgeRetroHippie

By the time the CBS News crews arrived to film ''[[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QJkSK_nU9Ik The Hippie Temptation,]]'' the documentary that gave most Americans their first glimpse of Music/TheGratefulDead, the Haight had been overrun with thousands of bewildered kids, most of the men [[https://ww2.kqed.org/arts/2017/09/20/the-summer-of-crap-peter-coyote-on-vietnam-and-life-in-the-60s/ rightfully apprehensive of the draft and being sent off to die]] in UsefulNotes/TheVietnamWar, and looking for a better world than the artificial StepfordSuburbia.[[note]]"Another Pleasant Valley Sunday, here in status symbol land..."[[/note]]

[[http://www.dailykos.com/story/2006/08/09/234908/- This stereotype is a caricature]] of a [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_hippie_movement series of art and political movements]] (plural) that started with the Beats, partly fueled and fused by LSD. Acid evangelists included Timothy Leary's [[EruditeStoner League for Spiritual Discovery]] and Ken Kesey's [[DrugsAreGood Merry]] [[EverybodyMustGetStoned Pranksters]]. There were also the [[http://diggers.org Diggers,]] the Tropers/{{Anonymous}} of the 1960s, who sought a realistic path to a totally free economy,[[note]]The familiar slogan "Do your own thing" originated with the Diggers: their other less-well-known slogan was "Everything is free." If you gave money to a Digger, he or she was liable to give it away or set it on fire.[[/note]] the [[http://diggers.org/alf Artists Liberation Front,]] and the [[http://www.sfmt.org/index.php San Francisco Mime Troupe]] street theater. [[http://www.gutenberg-e.org/hodgdon/11_Ch_01_ed.html Much more here]] about how these groups interacted and formed a new society. Word got out, attracting youthful runaways and seekers who flocked in the thousands to [[http://www.documentcloud.org/documents/809208-the-hashbury-is-the-capital-of-the-hippies.html San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury district]] and to [[http://ny.curbed.com/2014/9/4/10052426/the-strange-history-of-the-east-villages-most-famous-street New York's Lower East Side]] during the "Summer of Love". These seeking young people were the ones most people think of as "hippies" today although [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etymology_of_hippie the term is much older than that.]]

Naturally, this growing mainstream attention, especially by hangers-on who came for the SexDrugsAndRockAndRoll, led to a different, more negative hippie stereotype emerging by TheSeventies, especially as incidents like the [[Film/GimmeShelter1970 Altamont disaster]] and the [[UsefulNotes/CharlesManson Manson Family murders]] showed Americans [[HorrorHippies a dark side to the hippie movement]]. These hippies, instead of [[FreeLoveFuture free-love idealists]] who [[HigherUnderstandingThroughDrugs expanded their minds through psychoactive drugs]], meditation, travel, and art, were portrayed as burnouts under the sway of drug pushers, gangsters, and {{cult}} leaders who wished to exploit them both financially and sexually. Oftentimes, they were seen as susceptible to [[DirtyCommunists extreme leftist political ideologies]] as well. While there was some TruthInTelevision to this, many "New Left" activists of that era actually shared the disdain that the "squares" held for the hippie movement, albeit for very different reasons: they saw the hippies not as dangerous radicals shredding public morals and the fabric of society, but as [[ApatheticCitizens politically and socially apathetic]] and unwilling to actually face the problems in the world as opposed to withdrawing from it into their own communes and societies. Music/GilScottHeron, in his 1970 poem "Music/TheRevolutionWillNotBeTelevised", famously castigated the hippies as [[RuleAbidingRebel drones engaging in a hollow rebellion]] who would likely try to sit on the sidelines when the ''real'' revolution came, similar to the mainstream society they rejected, and reworked the famous slogan used to define the hippie culture into "plug in, turn on, and [[SellOut cop out]]". Either way, the excesses of the hippie movement made them a {{foil}} for conservative politicians and activists like UsefulNotes/RichardNixon and [[MoralGuardians the Moral Majority]] to play off against.

By TheEighties, the hippie movement was mostly dead to conservative mainstream society, though it would persist in the counterculture for some time and enjoy periodic revivals, especially in TheNineties when that decade's [[NostalgiaFilter '60s nostalgia]] brought everything from jam bands to tie-dye shirts to ''Film/AustinPowers''. Most notably, [[https://bampfa.org/program/hippie-modernism-struggle-utopia key elements of hippiedom]] went on to become [[{{Yuppie}} integral parts of modern society]], including [[http://members.aye.net/~hippie/hippie/special_.htm what you're reading this on.]] The ideals of the Haight-Ashbury counterculture heavily impacted the technology industry that arose in nearby Stanford and Silicon Valley, and with it the related hacker and computer cultures of the late 20th century, bringing to them a broadly anti-authoritarian culture, a belief in changing the world through technology, and the ideal that InformationWantsToBeFree. Timothy Leary, the LSD guru who coined the hippie slogan "turn on, tune in, and drop out", even celebrated the personal computer as the new LSD late in his life, and came up with a new, CyberPunk variation on his old saying: "turn on, boot up, jack in". Ironically, many of the original hippies scorned computers as tools of centralized control,[[note]]the Diggers, on the other hand, saw them as a new way to create art; Creator/RichardBrautigan, who worked with the Digger-led Communication Company, wrote [[https://allpoetry.com/All-Watched-Over-By-Machines-Of-Loving-Grace one of his most beautiful poems]] about computers enabling humanity to create a new {{Arcadia}}[[/note]] but the hackers saw them quite differently.