The sixties and seventies produced a generation of young people with a firm belief in love, peace, joy and equality. Wealth and conformity were no longer important. We were free to express our true selves without fear of judgement. We were all God’s children.

What happened?

We were the children of those who had experienced the full horror of yet another ‘war to end all wars’. The militarism, the lies, the deceit, the propaganda, the destruction, the austerity and suffering was over. Filled with hope and optimism for the future our uptight parents filled the post-apocalyptic world with little bundles of joy. It was a boom time for babies.

When the baby bubble became adults they burst onto the world in an explosion of joy, colour, music and fashion as a counterpoint to the austerity and greyness of the post war world. With it came a new attitude. We revelled in the joys of life. We were against war, bigotry, racism, inequality and sexism. We were for love, peace, festivals and very loud music. Oh … and drugs. This was the dawning of the Age of Aquarius. We could all live in love, harmony and compassion. Flower power was the creed of the day. Sex was no longer taboo.

The festival at Woodstock was the pinnacle of the new feeling. The actual festival was an organisational disaster but it succeeded in gathering together half a million young people with same dreams, hopes and aspirations for a better, peaceful world.

I wasn’t there. Neither was Joni Mitchell who wrote the definitive song about the event. Woodstock.

We are stardust
We are golden
And we’ve got to get ourselves back to the garden

We had a feeling that our parent’s generation had lost the plot and we had to return to a simpler more honest, peaceful humanity. The sex, drugs and rock and roll weren’t bad either!

To my mind Joni Mitchell was the consciousness of our generation.
This from “California” on the ‘Blue’ album.

Siting on a bench in Paris France
Reading the news and it sure looks bad
They won’t give peace a chance
That was just a dream some of us had

So my fellow hippies, what happened to the dream? Where are you all? Why haven’t we been able to change the world? Why do we continue to elect politicians who lead us into war? Why do we continue to live in fear?

The youthful enthusiasm, the love, the compassion and joy of life of the sixties and seventies seem to have vapourised.

But a lot of us aging hippies are still around. Some of us at least haven’t lost the feeling of those days. The feeling of being open and ‘real’ and vulnerable and accepting of all God’s children regardless of colour or ideological beliefs.

Interestingly modern technology, in the form of the internet, has given us the chance to get back to the garden, because holds the promise of making a good cottage industry living in our retirement from anywhere that has internet access. So come on baby boomers and hippies, let’s get back to that simple, loving, country lifestyle that we dreamed of. In the column to the right is a link to Amazon and an ebook with a basic introduction to internet marketing to get you started. It’s only $US9.99 and you can download it straight away. I think there is a paperback version if you prefer. Remember, when you get your website up and running, there is a link to a syndication company that I recommend on the top of the left sidebar. If you’ve got any questions, ask me in the comment section of this blog and I’ll do my best to help.

Now, the idea of hippies baby boomers getting old leads to an interesting thought. I’ve noticed that the older I get the more I reflect on the hippie way of life of the sixties, so I wonder what a retirement village or nursing home will be like when us hippies get there. Sex, drugs and rock and roll! A cosmic retirement commune with lots of concerts and loud music. Outrageous colourful hippie clothes, big hair, Jefferson Airplane karaoke competitions, pot plants everywhere. Swimming naked in the pool and groovy fondue dinner parties. We’ll have our own rock and roll band and let it all hang out. Cool man!
It’ll be good to salvage something of hippiedom. I’m looking forward to it.

If we weren’t able to change the world at least we can take the dream with us in an outrageous blaze of glory and embarrass the children.

When I was a young boy growing up in the UK, there was no such thing as television. My first experience of it was in 1952 watching the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II.  I was 8. We were the first in our street with a TV, (black & white in those days). I’d never heard of computers and I was in my 40’s before the first PCs became available …. with a hefty price tag! So you can imagine the steepness of the learning curve of someone who remembers life before TV trying to keep up with developments. My 8 and 5 year old grandchildren, on the other hand, seem to have been born with a mouse in hand.
But there is one thing us baby boomers and aging hippies have going for us. The idea, however dormant  that we don’t want to conform with conventional post industrial revolution square society. We rebelled against it, remember? Most of us conformed eventually, of course, just so that we could eat and raise a family, but in our souls, we just wanna be free man!

Now today an opportunity has presented itself that can enable us to dust of those sixties dreams, grow long hair, buy a lava lamp

and live a life of hippie freedom ….. oh .. err … man.
I refer, of course, to the internet. Invented by hippie nerds and developed to its current incarnation by the hippies’ children and grandchildren. Little know-it-alls. Just because they grew in the computer age!

‘So come on people now, let’s get together’ use the technology to drop out and make money at the same time. Possibly lots of it. Let’s face it even if your employer hasn’t stolen the superannuation money there is still not going to be enough to live on!

So how does it work? you ask.

Well, the ways you can make money on the internet are only limited by your imagination, but basically you are going to sell your own product or information, sell someone else’s product or information or use your websites as advertising hoardings.
Personally I prefer to sell someone else’s product for a commission. That way I haven’t got to worry about warehousing, inventory, post & packing, getting paid or dissatisfied customers. You can also use it as an advertising hoarding at the same time.
Here is a pretty good training course on selling other people’s stuff. It costs $US27 a month for an 11 month course, but if you are starting from scratch it’s a good way to learn and it’s pretty cheap.

Of course having a spiffy website and a great product to sell is only a part of the story. You’ll need people to find your website and click on the link to buy the product. In my opinion, the best method of doing that is offered by a company called Social Media Science. They even have a website construction service.

Now, you can have as many websites and products to sell as you like. Your only limit is time.

So, get to it baby booming hippies, let’s create a baby boomer lead recovery!
At the same time we can make lots of money, live outrageously and embarrass the children.

It was a morning that heart attacks are made of.

Bitterly cold with rain that could be best described as a miserable heavy drizzle. The sun had not yet made it over the horizon to brighten up the top of the rain cloud blanket.

The figures at the bus stops were barely discernable. Grey shapes with umbrellas against grey houses and pavements, limply illuminated by sickly yellow sodium streetlights. And it was Monday. The first day of the working week.

The bus driver was a different story. Relentlessly eccentric, laughing at a world that takes itself far too seriously. He had decorated his bus with stuffed toys of all colourful varieties, a lioness, a gorilla in a RAP outfit, a clown fish, a puppy dog in a fireman’s hat. In a plastic ice cream container taped to his change counter he offered free lollies for his passengers and wore on his head a hat in the shape of a pink pig with wings. The dismally damp Monday morning commuters could not help but smile when confronted with this theatre of the absurd. Folding their soggy umbrellas they fumble with frozen fingers to find money or season tickets.

As I watched the shadowy grinding traffic and listened to the hiss of tyres on wet tarmac, it struck me. Why on earth am I doing this to myself? Why is anyone doing this to themselves?

The truth is that we have gotten used to this way of life over the centuries, ever since the Luddites failed to stop the inexorable march of the industrial revolution. The factory or office and technology became more important than human beings or quality of life. It was this that the Luddites were actually opposed to. Technology that enslaved humanity rather than adding to what it was to be human.

So here we are a couple of centuries down the tarmacadam and we now accept as normal the concept of going somewhere away from home and family to exchange time for money in order to survive. A total dependence on some one else’s business and self-interest for survival.

A plague on this 19th century poverty mindset. I needed to take control of my life. Live how I want to live, relying on my own talents and initiative. Stop travelling on buses on dark wet Monday mornings. I’ll start an internet business.

The Internet is, in effect, the next revolution. Most interestingly it enables those who are willing to embrace it, a chance to return to the idyllic days of a pre-industrial revolution lifestyle, but with broadband and enjoy a modern day version of self employed bliss.

And what an enviable way of life it was back then. Picture this, (please go to iTunes download and play ‘Morning’ from the Peer Gynt Suite), a cottage in the bucolic English countryside. Butterflies flit from colourful flower to colourful flower whilst the birds sing sweetly in the lush green trees by the babbling brook. Inside the cottage the weaver is contently finishing his latest creation destined for the markets of Europe and because the price of his goods never changes, he knows how much he will be paid. His wife and children are happily helping him in his tasks. Pausing to refresh himself from his labours, he wanders out into the garden to check on the progress of the spinach, pulls a few weeds out of the potato patch and throws the chickens some food left over from the family lunch. At no time is he separated from home and family and he never gets on a Monday morning bus!

Today, thanks to appropriate technology, we have the opportunity to conduct business at home whilst packing the kids off to school, planting the spinach, feeding the chickens and maybe indulging in an afternoon delight between google-ads.

The computer has replaced the weaver’s loom, the Internet has replaced the traveling merchants, software has replaced the yarn, but I bet you we have the same aspirations for peace, joy and happiness as our ancestors. But probably not pink pig hats! They didn’t need them.

I often wonder what life would be like if the Luddites hadn’t failed in their attempt to humanise progress. But unfortunately they couldn’t win. For starters they weren’t an actual organised entity, just a collection of individuals who stood to loose most from, what was later termed, the Industrial Revolution. They were up against those with the capital, the British government, (predominately the same people), the British Army and the Police Force. Even so it took hastily drafted draconian laws, quite a few hangings and a lot of violence to quell them.

We are living with their defeat today. It’s why we travel in peak hour droves to a place of work where we exchange large slabs of our lives for money.

Before the industrial revolution there was an organic economy based on land, labour and local exchange.

The weavers of the north of England were largely one-person home businesses. Apart from producing woven goods, often with the involvement of his family, the weaver also had a small self-sufficient family vegetable garden.

Because of the quality and the demand for his manufactured goods, he was always assured that everything he produced would be sold at a constant price. He and his family had abundance, stability and unrestrained social interaction.

Then along came more advanced technology which allowed the manufacture of goods, although inferior in quality, independent of nature, of geography and season and weather, of sun or wind or water or human and animal power. It produced an economy based upon fuel, factory and foreign trade. Humans became a minor consideration in the manufacture of goods and were now serving the machine.
It was this uncontrolled empowerment of the machine in human society that the Luddites fought against.

The people who formed the Luddite movement were mainly weavers or similar craftsmen. They had the most to loose. They fought for and lost their idyllic cottage industry lifestyle of stability and self-reliance. The very quality of life that a lot of us yearn for today.
The combined power of weaving machines, the steam engine, the laws of enclosure that enabled industrialists to fence off farming land and build factories, put an end to the weavers way of life. Whereas before the factories, agreed customary prices and therefore income were stable, the new technology brought with it a free market economy, which drove prices and wages down along with the quality of the product.

Life for the displaced farmers and weavers forced into the urban factories had become grim. Working for long hours in dangerous conditions with no days off for very low pay, men, women and children spent their lives either working or sleeping. Several families would have to share one house to save on rent. Humans had become a disposable adjunct to the machine. This is what the Luddites and those before them were against.

History is written by the victors, who were obviously not the Luddites, which is how the word has come to be used to mean a stupid person who doesn’t understand and is opposed to advances in technology. They were in fact very perceptive. They could see what was going to happen to humanity.
And they were right. Despite their valiant opposition we now have a collective mindset that says we must have a JOB and go to WORK for some one else.

It is now taken for granted that production and technological progress is more important than being human.
There was a brief time, with the advent of computers, that we all entertained the idea that computers would handle the more mundane tasks of modern life such that the working week would be reduced to three or four days, maybe less. It’s what the Luddites would have supported. Didn’t happen. The increased capacity that computers gave us was simply used to produce more, not improve humanity. The amount of time many office workers spend away from home at a JOB has actually increased.

Interestingly a totally unplanned result of computer technology has given us all a chance to recreate the weaver’s lifestyle.

I’m referring to the internet.

There are those that have replaced the loom with the computer and yarn with broadband. They have offices in their homes where they can interact with their families, live in a country environment where they can grow vegetables and keep chickens should they choose. As for products they range from selling information to buying and selling on e-bay, trading in stocks and shares to advertising.
Thanks to appropriate technology, we have the opportunity to conduct business whilst packing the kids off to school, planting the spinach, feeding the chickens and maybe an afternoon delight between Google-ads!
Used this way the computer can give us more free time and at last live up to it’s promise.

It’s not much but I know that the mythical Ned Ludd would approve.

One of the key components of the pre-industrial revolution cottage industry was the merchant. He was the entrepreneur. He would travel from artisan to artisan supplying raw materials and collecting the finished produce that he would then on sell.

Today, using the same model, the weaver would also become the entrepreneur. He or she would buy raw materials over the internet and sell the finished article the same way. No need to travel town to town. The weaver and family could live anywhere they like as long as they have access to the ‘net. This principle can be extended to a whole range of services and industries.

Of course, the new entrepreneur needs to be able to access the billions of potential customers that are waiting all around the world. This requires an ability to attract people (traffic) to your website. One of the best ways to do this that I know of can be accessed through the ad in the top left hand corner of this page.

So, and ironically through the use of modern technology, the Luddites dream of sustainable cottage industries is re-born.

You’ll have to excuse me now, I’ve just got to go and see what arrived in the bank account today and collect some eggs. Might dig some potatoes as well. Where’s that garden fork?