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Lee Felsenstein was a hacker who had dropped out of university and lived on the fringes of mainstream society in Berkeley, California, where his time was divided between political activism and computing. Felsenstein also wrote for an avant-garde publication The Tribe and in 1973 he was the leader of a project called Community Memory. The project consisted in an experimental network with two terminals connected to a computer on a time-shared basis, set up in public places (a university record shop and an popular library). According to one of the theoreticians of the project: "Community Memory is convivial and participatory. The system is an actively open ("free") information system, enabling direct communications among its users and with no centralized editing or control over the information exchanged... Such a system represents a precise antithesis to the dominant uses of electronic media, which broadcast centrally-determined messages to mass passive audiences." Feldenstein had developed this communicational and convivial view of computers after reading Ivan Illich's Tools for Conviviality.

This wish to create human-machine symbiosis corresponded to a typical approach of the California counterculture at the time, which saw electronics and computers as ecological techniques. The association that had organized the Community Memory project was called "Loving Grace Cybernetics," the title of a hippie poem by Richard Brautigan.

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This poem combines a number of important features of the hippie culture: the ideas of peace and love, the desire to return to nature and, simultaneously, the passion for certain electronic technologies. The Community Memory experience was part of this cultural scene. It lasted for a little over a year. The computer terminal became a sort of public electronic notice board where a wide diversity of advertisements and information were displayed. (pp 68-69)

From The Internet Imaginaire by Patrice Flichy