About Digital Be-In 14
This year’s Be-In theme “Planet Code” implies our writing (and re-writing where necessary) the “codes” that define our place within and interaction with the natural environment, and calls upon the high technology community we have encouraged and celebrated over the years to empower the sustainability movement with bold, forward-thinking initiatives.

The Planet Code Symposium is organized by Green Century Institute, Planetwork and Imaginify Community Network (ICN), with an early networking salon hosted by the San Francisco Alliance of Urban Sustainability.

Digital Be-In 14 is produced by
Cyberset Music and Media and Green Century Institute under the direction of founder Michael Gosney.

Digital Be-In History
Digital Be-In Founder and Executive Producer Michael Gosney (whose Verbum magazine began the event as its Macworld Expo party in the late 1980s) developed the event through the 1990s, as well as the Paradox conferences on sustainable communities at Arcosanti, Arizona in 1997, 1999 and 2001. Gosney formed the Green Century Institute in San Francisco in 2002.

Above: Producer Michael Gosney at Digital Be-In Tokyo '95 presenting a taped speech from Timothy Leary: "Japan is going to teach us how to 'Turn On, Intertune In, and Shine Out!'"

Previous Be-In Themes (See the media links to past Be-Ins >>)

08 – Freedom of Speech on the Internet (EFF Blue Ribbon campaign launch) - 1996
09 – Cultural Diversity in Cyberspace (w/ Unity Foundation) - 1997
10 – Human Rights in the Digital Age
(with UN 50th Anniv. of Declaration of Human Rights) - 1998
11 – Body, Mind and Cyberspace (feat. Drug Peace Campaign) - 1999
12 – Media Revolution - 2002
13 – Transparent Network - 2004

Be-In Speakers have included:

- Oakland Mayor Jerry Brown (Left, at the Digital Be-In 9, January 1997)
- Paul Brainerd (founder, Aldus)
- Timothy Leary
- Joan Blades, co-founder Move-On.org
- John Perry Barlow, co-founder Electronic Frontier Foundation
- San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown
- Ted Nelson, hypermedia visionary
- Brenda Laurel, digital art pioneer
- Daniel Sheehan, social justice attorney
- Allen Cohen (founder, San Francisco Oracle, co-organizer, Human Be-In)
- Chet Helms (founder Family Dog/Avalon Ballroom, co-organizer Human Be-In)

Be-In performing artists have included:

- George Clinton
- Todd Rundgren
- Jon Anderson of Yes
- Fiorella Terenzi
- The Residents
- Second Sight with Bob Bralove, Grateful Dead
- Trance Mission with Stephen Kent
- D'Cuckoo
- Scott Page of Pink Floyd and Supertramp

Below: Ken Kesey performing at DBI 11 in January 1999, when the Prankster’s Magic Bus made it’s last journey to San Francisco.

The Human Be-In: Spark of the Counterculture
The precursor of the Digital Be-In was San Francisco’s legendary Human Be-In. “A Gathering of the Tribes for a Human Be-In,” announced on the cover of the new issue of the San Francisco Oracle newspaper, would feature Timothy Leary, Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, Richard (Ram Dass) Alpert, Dick Gregory, Lenore Kandel, Jerry Ruben, and “All SF Rock Bands” on January 14, 1967, 1 to 5 pm in Golden Gate Park’s Polo Field. An estimated 30,000 people attended to hear The Grateful Dead, Quicksilver Messenger Service and other bands while listening to speakers address the need for moving the counter culture toward peaceful demonstrations and positive solutions. Tim Leary, in his first San Francisco appearance, uttered the sound bite of the decade: "Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out."

San Francisco Oracle publisher and Human Be-In co-organizer Allen Cohen characterized the event as a necessary meeting-of-the-minds, bringing together the philosophically opposed factions of the late 1966 San Francisco-based counter culture. The Be-In focused the key ideas of the 1960s counter-culture: personal power, decentralization, ecological awareness, consciousness expansion. More encompassing than a war protest movement, the counter culture "questioned authority" in regard to civil rights, women's rights, and consumer rights, shaped its own alternative media, the "underground" newspapers and FM radio stations, and spawned new directions in music, art, and technology.

In the 1970s, the dynamic San Francisco area milieu, blending Silicon Valley with Haight Ashbury and Berkeley, gave birth to the personal computer - the ultimate gesture of personal power, "counter" to the then-prevailing main frame computer paradigm that implied centralized authority. The personal computer opened up the world of software development and ultimately led to the digital media revolution in the 1980s and the Internet ear of the ‘90s.

Chet Helms, http://www.woodstocknation.org/chethelms.htm widely regarded as the father of the SF ‘60s cultural movement, participated, along with Leary and Cohen in the Digital Be-Ins through the 1990s. Leaders in the cyberculture world have marked the Digital Be-Ins as speakers and prominent attendees.