Something we tend to forget is that the counterculture generation was perhaps the last to grow up learning a set of valuable skills most of us today never really think about anymore, things like woodworking, baking (from scratch!), sewing, metalworking, and general craftsmanship. It's weird to imagine this, but the consumer-goods boom really only started around the time the counterculture was forming, and it was against this consumerism (and many, many other factors) that the counterculture formed its governing principles.
Cue the 21st century. We were thrown into the "future" with promises of flying cars, Star Trek style interactive computers, and faster-than-light travel. None of these really panned out (YET. I'm still waiting for my jetpack), but in the race to innovate, companies have used lower and lower quality materials, QC procedures, and generally have lowered the standards of manufacture while increasing the price with the justification that as commodities, they are obliged to charge what the consumer is willing to pay.
And this place we're in now, where technology is largely proprietary and owned not by the community but by private corporations, is precisely the location from which the counterculture was trying to push us away. Unfortunately for that philosophy of quality-above-all-else, the counterculture has largely assimilated itself into the mainstream, and its members have families, jobs, mortgages, and practical problems of their own, seemingly erasing the possibility of accomplishing this goal.
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