BrinkLindsey.com – The Age of Abundance

My new book is about the interplay between economic change and cultural change in postwar America. My main focus is on how the former brought about the latter — specifically, how mass prosperity triggered first the social upheavals of the ’60s and ’70s, and then the hyperpluralistic “plenitude” of the ’90s and ’00s.

But causation has been running in the other direction as well, and one of the clearest examples of this can be found in the countercultural roots of the PC revolution. There’s an interesting 2006 book on this subject, What the Dormouse Said, for those of you who want to explore these connections in detail.

I’ll be tracing this causal thread in blog posts now and again. Let me start off with this wonderfully trippy poem, “All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace,” by Richard Brautigan:

I like to think (and
the sooner the better!)
of a cybernetic meadow
where mammals and computers
live together in mutually
programming harmony
like pure water
touching clear sky.

I like to think
(right now, please!)
of a cybernetic forest
filled with pines and electronics
where deer stroll peacefully
past computers
as if they were flowers
with spinning blossoms.

I like to think
(it has to be!)
of a cybernetic ecology
where we are free of our labors
and joined back to nature,
returned to our mammal brothers and sisters,
and all watched over
by machines of loving grace.

This poem was written in 1967 — the same year, by the way, that Brautigan served as Poet-in-Residence at Caltech.