The Intellectual, the Merchant and the Warrior “There’s a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can’t take part, you can’t even tacitly take part. And you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop. And you’ve got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you’re free, the machine will be prevented from working at all.” (Savio apud Draper 1965)
These words, pronounced by Mario Savio at Berkeley Sproul Hall, in the year 1964, can be considered the beginning of the movement that shook the world in the ‘60s peaking in 1968. The student movement was originally motivated by the understanding that knowledge is submitted to the military system, particularly to the criminal war that the United States were waging in Indochina. For the students of the free speech movement the university was an instrument of the war politics of the American government and of the overall capitalist machine. The area where the student’s revolt began is the area where—years later— the new industry of electronics and computing thrived. In the book From Counterculture to Cyberculture Fred Turner writes: “Thirty years later, the same aspects of computing that threatened to dehumanize the students of the Free speech movement, promised to liberate the users of the Internet. On February 8th 1996 John Perry Barlow, an information technology journalist and pundit, and a former lyricist for the house band of the San Francisco LSD scene, the Grateful Dead, found himself at his laptop computer in Davos, Switzerland. While attending the World Economic Forum, an international summit of politicians and corporate executives, he had watched the American Congress pass the Telecommunications act, and with it a rider called the Communicative Decency Act, which aimed to restrict pornography on the Internet. Incensed by what he perceived to be the rider’s threat to free speech, Barlow drafted the Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace and posted it to the Internet. According to Barlow the governments of the Industrial World had become weary giants of flesh and steel.” (Turner 2006, 13)
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