“I am an engineer and therefore a radical”: an interview with Lee Felsenstein, from Free Speech Movement technician to Homebrew Computer Club moderator

Abstract

The following interview delves into Lee Felsenstein's upbringing in a bohemian communist family and his path as an engineer and technologist in the San Francisco Bay Area. He discusses his role as technician of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement, co-creator of Community Memory and moderator of the Homebrew Computer Club. Felsenstein also shares his vision of “community”, “convivial tools” as defined by Ivan Illich and technology as an “invisible force”. He proves how his political activism has guided his technological creative process, making and sharing tools that will contribute to build convivial, open and informed communities.

Keywords:

• Engineer
• radical
• technology
• tools
• computer
• community
• diy
• maker
• cyberspace
• information

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Throughout the 1940s and 1950s, the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) investigated American citizens suspected of having affiliations with the communist party. In May 1960, as the HUAC held hearings at the San Francisco City Hall and refused access to the general public, a protest started, mostly formed by Bay Area students.

2 The “Youth March for Integrated Schools” events happened on October 25^th, 1958 and April 18^th, 1959, the second one was the most attended one, and the one Lee Felsenstein is referring to.

3 The 1950s, with the opening of City Lights Bookstore by Lawrence Ferlinghetti in the North Beach neighborhood, confirmed San Francisco as an artistic and literary center. The bohemian community, then followed by the Beat generation writers and poets, gathered and created in the city and its region, inspiring a new generation of young people to move to the area and invent new ways of living outside of mainstream America.

4 Madame Nhu gave a speech to UC Berkeley students on October 29^th, 1963.

5 Following the occupation of Sproul Hall the night before and because he was engaging in political activism on campus, former UC Berkeley student Jack Weinberg was arrested for violating the University's rules on October 1^st, 1964. The police car he was taken to was spontaneously surrounded by Free Speech Movement activists and students in an act of civil disobedience. The sit-in lasted for over thirty hours, interspersed by speeches given from the police car roof by activists such as Weinberg and Mario Savio, it symbolically marked the beginning of the student protest movement for freedom of expression and social justice. See Cohen, R. (2014). Freedom’s Orator: Mario Savio and the Radical Legacy of the 1960s. Oxford University Press.

6 From 1968 to 1974, Stewart Brand managed to gather a real community of readers and reviewers of the tools presented in the pages of his catalog. From books on geodesic domes, nature or cooking to hand woodworking tools and wind generators, The Whole Earth Catalog, which first provided information and “access to tools” to back-to-the-land communes, became of interest to a wider DIY and technologist readership throughout the US. See Brand, S. (1968). Whole Earth Catalog: Access to Tools. Turner, F. (2006). From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism. University of Chicago Press.

7 Video Display Module, later the inspiration for the display of personal computers.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Julie Momméja

Julie Momméja is a Doctor in American and Media Studies from the Sorbonne Nouvelle University, Paris, and a scholar-in-residence at the Long Now Foundation, San Francisco. She was also a visiting researcher at UC Berkeley from 2014 to 2017. Julie’s research focuses on pioneers and thinkers within the San Francisco Bay Area counterculture and cyberculture spheres and the emergence of technology as a social tool on a territory rooted in utopian and libertarian ideologies. Her PhD dissertation, “From The Whole Earth Catalog to the Long Now Foundation in the San Francisco Bay Area: co-evolution on the creative 'Frontier' (1955- 2020)”, explores bonds, connections and fusions between offline and virtual communities, from the 1950s until 2020, within a context of long-term co-evolution between humans and machines favored by the specificity of the local Bay Area mindset.