The Corporation and the Counterculture

Аннотация

To date, many historians liave accepted tiie notion that the American counterculture stood in opposition to the vaiues of mainstream. Cold War America. This article aims to challenge that view. It returns to Osaka, Japan, and Expo 70 in order to revisit the Pepsi Pavilion—an immersive computational and artistic environment—and explore the ways it brought together military planners, corporate executives, hippie artists, and Bell Labs engineers. By doing so, the essay shows how the ideals and technologies ofthe Cold War military-industriai research world served as resources for countercultural artists. It also shows how those artists helped give form and legitimacy to the new managerial mode of American political power.