Silicon Valley Revolution

About the Film:

Part of Berlin & Beyond Honolulu 2017

Directed by Jan Tenhaven. Germany. 2017. 90 min. English and German with English subtitles.

What came before Apple’s world domination? Find out in this documentary about the San Francisco Bay Area’s influential personal computer pioneers. In the late 1960s, giant mainframe computers owned by large corporations and the government were seen as tools of control. Hippies and the anti-Vietnam War protests led to a revolutionary idea—creating an affordable home computer—or “fantasy amplifier”—to be used by ordinary people as a counterbalance to Big Brother. The rest is history, but what happened to the early ideals and ethos of free sharing? As one of the visionaries puts it: “It’s true that what I helped to create is today’s establishment. That’s what I was trying to get rid of: the establishment.”