Early Google staff embedded counterculture values like Burning Man into company culture.
Evidence
In that way the early web was exactly like the 1960s counterculture: it encouraged both a Great Refusal of what had always been handed down from on high, and asked people to spend more time with each other. It asserted that money need not be involved in attentional barter, and that everyone had an inherent potential to be a creator. In the early days at some companies, like Google, the link was more explicit, with much of the company retreating to the Burning Man festival every year and management espousing the value of putting in place a practical, pragmatic implementation of the counterculture’s ideas. — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 920
Categorization
- XREF: The Google-Burning Man link is covered at length in Fred Turner’s ‘From Counterculture to Cyberculture’ — direct corroboration. — connects to: Burning Man models the ideals and labor structures of tech culture — Alice E. Marwick, Status Update: Celebrity, Publicity,…, 139; Google’s success stems from radical social relations, not technological prowess alone — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 69; Google’s founding culture was a radical technical meritocracy contemptuous of mundane business — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 881 (+1 more)