Steve Jobs Was Not A Hippie!

I posted this little rant of mine on Purrvasive Computing right after 60 Minutes aired its interview with that hack, Walter Isaacson, about his bio of Steve Jobs. Now again another media giant is repeating the trope that Steve Jobs was a hippie, National Geographic's  "The '80s The Decade that Made US."   Nat'l Geo really ought to stick to geography and leave the sociology to someone else.
                                       

 Steve Jobs Was Not A Hippie!

I bristle every time I hear the media call Steve Jobs a hippie. I watched the 60 Minutes interview with Walter Isaacson, and was appalled by the way Steve Kroft spit out "hippie" with undisguised disdain. What does the media know from hippie? Steve Jobs was several years younger than me, and I was too young to have run away to Haight-Ashbury and be a real hippie. What I became in the early seventies was a "freak."  Hippies were long dead by then. A lot of the things we associate with hippies and the Sixties, were actually much more culturally predominant in the early Seventies. Long hair, hard rock, marijuana use, etc., were not culturally or geographically widespread until then. Don't believe me? Look at high school yearbooks, and try to find many young males with long hair before 1970. The media seems to dwell on the social unrest of 1968, but the real peak of anti-war protest occurred in Seventies. Kent State happened in 1970, but much less well known is the intense riot in Albuquerque, New Mexico in 1971, when much of the business district along Central Ave. adjacent to the University of New Mexico campus was burned down.

Steve Jobs may have taken LSD, and appropriated some of the hippie ethos, but I really doubt if Mr. Jobs had any intention of renouncing his upper middleclass comforts and privileges. Actual hippies of the 60s were highly ambivalent about technology, if not downright hostile to it. 

Death of Hippie March - December 17, 1966
Please note that this date is before the "Summer of Love" of 1967
Steve Jobs was 11 years old.

"Fresh air frolics...whatever happened to swallowing goldfish?..."  Notice how short these "hippies" hair really was back in 1967. 

Today's cultural critics bemoan the speed with which cultural trends disseminate due to social media. Yeah well, please notice the date of this classic Hollywood exploitation film, it sure did not take them long.