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There are more interconnections between the ’60s and now than most folks realize. As this review and book point out, much of the foundation for the Internet came into being in the ’60s and ’70s as the US recognized the need for and built up a resilient communications infrastructure. One irony of moving from government/university based Internet to privatized Internet is that that resilience may be much weaker as the private providers each attempt to gain a secure economic position supporting it.

There is much more in this review and this book.
Cyberculture’s Roots in ’60s Counterculture
book review by Marjory S. Blumenthal, TechNewsWorld, Issues in Science and Technology, 08/12/07

From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism  by Fred Turner. University of Chicago Press, 2006, 354 pp.

Where did the Internet come from? Why has it affected society as it has?

These questions have prompted several books over the past few years, books that have celebrated the technologists of the 1960s and 1970s, the observations of trend-spotting social scientists beginning in the 1980s, or the pioneering entrepreneurs of the 1990s. A more global view has been missing, and From Counterculture to Cyberculture aims to provide one….

From Counterculture to Cyberculture is a timely, thoughtful, and eccentric contribution to the growing literature on the Internet and its effects. Weaving together strands of U.S. social history during the second half of the 20th century, Stanford University’s Fred Turner essentially presents an argument about the relevance of the Internet by emphasizing its connection to the generation that made “relevance” the touchstone for cultural value….