Hi, I'm Orman Alney.

As you're chatting with friends on your smartphone or reading the news or shopping for shoes,

might be hard to believe that Facebook, Google, Apple, and Amazon got their inspiration

from the Back to the Woods hippie communes of the 1960s, from people like Ken Kese or Stuart Brand, who invented the whole

earth catalog, the magazine Steve Jobs called one of the Bibles of his generation.

Well, now Steve Jobs Apple, along with Facebook, Google, and Amazon, are all tech monopolies

very different from monopolies of the past?

They're not trying to corner the market on oil or textiles.

They're trying to encompass all of existence.

That's according to Franklin Four, a writer for The Atlantic, in his new book,

World Without Mind, The Existential Threat of Big Tech.

And it all goes back to the 1960s.

One of the exciting things about the 1960s was you had the San Francisco Mid Peninsula,

which happened to be the birthplace of the counterculture. It's where the Grateful Dead came from.

It's the source of our fascination with LSD.

And it was also the birthplace of the technology industry.

And the tech industry and the counterculture grew up side by side.

They rubbed up against one another.

And a lot of the ideals of the counterculture became the ideals of the tech industry.

So you had a lot of people fleeing to the communes during this period.

And it was something, the idea of the commune of this place where we could achieve a global consciousness,

where we could transcend our individuality and become part of something bigger and more profound

...