Three Revolutions

Lee Felsenstein, an engineer who helped shape early personal computing, frames revolutions by mass participation, the overthrow of an existing order, and unexpected consequences. He starts with the 1964 Free Speech Movement at Berkeley, where students sat in, held a police car on campus, and won a faculty vote that ended the university's role as a parent. The organizing through leaflets and a phone room also helped isolated students form a community.

His second revolution is personal computing. A 1973 magazine article on a TV typewriter drew thousands of replies, and the 1975 Altair kit spawned a market for add-on cards. He describes the Homebrew Computer Club sharing software against mainframe norms and resisting IBM's closed designs. His Community Memory project, a free walk-up bulletin board from 1973, showed that ordinary people could use shared terminals. He notes that IBM's later PC had to publish its schematics.

The third revolution, he argues, is reclaiming a communication commons from mass and digital media. He sketches a civic social media system: open source, community-hosted, stewarded by librarians, funded by users rather than advertising, with referrers, journalists, and comment threads that can be answered but never blocked. In the question period he suggested phone numbers as a stopgap for identity and pointed to anonymous mixnet contact discovery as an open project. The design remains unfinished, and he invites engineers to help.