about
A Podcast Series by Evgeny Morozov. Original music by Brian Eno.
Forget the military or Silicon Valley: we owe our smart technologies - from toothbrushes to beds - to a band of eccentric 1960s hippies. Hidden away in a secretive, privately funded lab on Boston’s waterfront, these visionaries developed intimate, personal technologies a decade before Steve Jobs.
But their rebellion was fraught with obstacles: the military-industrial complex, corporate resistance, and the founders’ larger-than-life personalities. As Silicon Valley adopted their ideas, the lab’s vision for more humane and diverse technologies was twisted into something entirely different.
A decade in the making, this podcast unravels their captivating and often tragic tale. It’s all here: Cold War psychiatry, Maoism, LSD, the Rockefellers, Scientology, CIA’s forays into extrasensory perception, and even the advent of tech libertarianism.
Having listened to this all when it was released I can highly recommend, as well as Evgeny’s other podcast, the first in the series: https://choramedia.com/podcast/the-santiago-boys/
A third is supposed to be coming too
