How The Grateful Dead Built The Internet

Here’s an interesting piece, from the BBC of all places, about the
role that a hippie band that started in the 1960s went on to play in
the culture of the early Internet
<https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20250618-how-the-grateful-dead-shaped-social-media>.
Not only were their stage shows technology-heavy, but they somehow
managed to attract a major following among technologists of all kinds.

Among the other members of that milieu was Steward Brand, creator of
the Whole Earth Catalog, a resource for those looking for tools to
help them live a simpler life, less dominated by faceless corporates
and promoting more intimate, personal power. Quote from the
introduction:

    “We are as gods and might as well get used to it.”

Brand went on to co-found the WELL, aka the “Whole Earth ’Lectronic
Link”, which started out as a BBS with users connecting via dialup
lines, before becoming an Internet-connected service -- one of the
earliest examples, if not *the* earliest example, of “social media”,
if you will.

John Perry Barlow, one of the lyricists for the Grateful Dead, got
heavily involved in the WELL and then went on to found the Electronic
Frontier Foundation, dedicated to the preservation of free speech and
other civil rights in the online world.