My $0.02 is that I find hippies more or less incomprehensible. Pretty much the same as my view of the Occupy crowd. I don't dislike them or anything, I just don't really identify with their philosophy. Even when there is some crossover, I don't associate those intersecting ideas as being hippie-related. A fair majority of the things they were concerned about seem to be irrational, which doesn't appeal to me at all. e.g. the religious/astrology/spiritualism aspects.I think you probably had to be there at the time, which of course isn't really possible for 9/10 of people in the forum since that would most likely make them 60 - 80 years old if they were teenagers or in their twenties when it all went down.FWIW, I think the movement probably was a delayed side affect of the Second World War. When entire generations go through a bunch of really horrible shit, the experience + demographic changes probably produce a generation with the urge to disassociate themselves from that world as far as humanly possible. Seems fair enough if you ask me! It's this kind of flexibility that allows humankind to adapt and renew itself.Secondly, the Communists deliberately used the hippie movement to further their ideals, if you read the literature from intelligence agencies back then you'll see they were enthusiastic about co-opting such social movements as a way of screwing with the American government. I don't think this had the desired affect, but the pro-socialism alignment many hippies identified with wasn't entirely organic, it was partly cynically manufactured by think-tanks behind the Iron Curtain (you see a tiny echo of this in the way the Occupy movement is being co-opted by Marxists/Labor movements today). However I don't think this could ultimately work. Socialists are almost as leery of Communism as Capitalism when you get right down to it. The hippies were as pleased as everybody else when the Wall fall, it was their victory too. That western culture allows such things as artifacts as blue jeans, punk hairstyles and rock and roll really matters, ask any former resident of the Soviet Union and they'll tell you the same thing. The hippie movement was not pro-Capitalist, but it was not anti-Western even if they experimented with Eastern philosophies. In fact the conflict between conservatism and liberalism is a staple of Western thought and always has been. This is entirely unlike something like Confucianism, which would never tolerate a hippie movement. Some, but not all of popular Eastern thought is seriously authoritarian. --I think that the concepts of Cypherpunk e.g. BTC, PGP, SR and so forth are likely to go viral in a very big way, that's starting to happen right now. I know that Cypherpunk is perceived as being extremely cool by unanimous verdict of my younger associates (because it is!). We have a young population growing up who've spent their teenage years under various sorts of surveillance, whose parents regularly get urine tests for drugs, who are aware of their being tracked by various mechanisms like credit cards, internet browsing history. Hackers who subvert the system are universally respected for their know-how in youth culture today. Once the average teenager reaches the correct level of sophistication and paranoia in their computer use, it's almost certain many of them will revolt in some way against the system. Crypto-anarchy fits the bill for both liberal ideals and practical financial reasons. The right mix of political circumstances will plan straight into our cryptopaws. Anonymous are just the first such rebellion I think, this shall be a recurring theme in the years to come. Hacktivism is being misinterpreted as nation state political activism spreading into cyberspace, but this isn't as important as it's being made out to be. The vast, vast majority of hackers couldn't give a fuck about nationalism, at least not of the classical cheer-leading sort anyway.That anarcho-capitalism and anarcho-socialism emphasize the Non-Aggression-Principal is probably strengthened by previous peacenik movements such as the hippies. Admittedly NAP does not mean pacifism, but still. The only real ideological requirement to become a Cypherpunk is to be a libertarian, you could be left or right wing, it doesn't matter which since this is a common ground between us. Here and now the State is the biggest problem there is. Get rid of State power and the majority of monopolies and oligarchies shall fall too, it's a win-win situation from the libertarian perspective.Lest we forget, PGP itself was invented by Phil Zimmerman, whose motivation at the time was to help anti-nuclear protesters. So, the hippie movement and cypherpunk are definitely linked, even if I don't "get" the first one.