The spirit of Silicon Valley emerged to a large extent from the hippie culture - this has been known at least since Fred Turner's insightful non-fiction book "From Counterculture to Cyberculture".

In it, he describes how the counterculture moved from a rejection of the military-industrial complex to an outright embrace of technology.

Jan Wiele

Editor in the Feuilleton.

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Anecdotally, his story culminates in calling underground California writer Richard Brautigan, who, although a "long-haired poet" on the streets of Haight-Ashbury in the summer of 1967, i.e. a prototypical hippie, in his handwritten passerby poem "All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace” dreamed of a “cybernetic meadow” where “mammals and computers” (!) live happily together and program each other harmoniously.

It was also well known that Steve Jobs, the co-founder of the computer company Apple, who turned it from a garage dumpster into a global company and soon embodied it as an icon, was also inspired by this spirit: from various biographies, from films or from the BBC documentary “Billion Dollar Hippy".

"still intact"

One is also reminded of this these days by an impressive picture, namely that of the Birkenstock sandals, which Jobs wore extensively in the seventies and eighties, if not to say completely worn out, and which have now been auctioned off.

They didn't make billions, but they did get $220,000 from an unknown bidder - according to the seller Julien's Auctions in New York, this is the highest sum ever fetched for a pair of sandals (although the price also included an associated NFT) .

The brown suede Birkenstocks had previously been seen at various exhibitions and Jobs was said to have worn them to the iconic garage and "at many pivotal moments in Apple's history."

A former partner of the tech guru, who died in 2011, told the press that Jobs wore the sandals even in winter, saying they were "his uniform."

One could now conclude from this that the Birkenstocks, model “Arizona”, were talismans, even fairytale galoshes, of luck for Jobs – even more than his black turtleneck sweater or the sneakers he wore for show.

Interestingly, the auction house mentioned they were "still intact" despite visible wear.

Here you can't help but notice an ironic discrepancy to what the monopolist Apple stands for today: Still good, intact devices are mercilessly cut off from updates so that customers keep buying new ones.

To what extent the connection between counter and cyber culture, the apparently straight path from muesli to memes, has long since become a farce can be read in Joshua Cohen's satirical technology novel "Book of Numbers", the staff of which was not least inspired by Steve Jobs.