From Counterculture to Cyberculture
Book: From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism. Fred Turner. University of Chicago Press: 328 pp.,
URL = http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/817415.html
Review
1.
Excerpts from [1]
"From Counterculture to Cyberculture" by Fred Turner is at times a difficult read. The reporter-turned-academic now eschews journalese with the zeal of a true convert, and his alternative principles of story organization seem purely intuitive. But if, like me, you remember how well Turner's "Echoes of Combat" (1996) explored and clarified the Vietnam War's effect on American culture, you will continue to beat your head against this book with real determination. If you do that, it eventually opens like a piñata with a nearly endless shower of goodies.
Turner is eager to trace the complex legacy of cybernetic theory and ideology from its World War II-era birthplace (the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Radiation Laboratory) through the counterculture of the 1960s to the rise of networked computing and the misleading ideology of purity that underlies contemporary views of cyberspace. If it resists casual reading, the book, with its countercurrents and nuances, still recalls works of the highest standard that also address technology's interactions with national culture: David E. Nye's "American Technological Sublime" (1994) comes to mind, as does Norman Mailer's "Of a Fire on the Moon" (1971).
Turner describes how the back-to-the-land movement of the 1960s and early '70s eventually turned away from the political work of community-building toward the increasingly elitist belief that small technologies would transform consciousness and that together machinery and consciousness would provide the basis of a new social order. He begins with contrasting ideological notions about information technology. In 1964, Mario Savio of the UC Berkeley Free Speech Movement denounced what Turner calls "the power of computers to render the embodied lives of individual students as bits of computer-processed information." But in 1996 John Perry Barlow, a former lyricist for the Grateful Dead, saw the same computational power as a chance to enter a world of authentic identity and communal collaboration. Clearly, something had changed. The remainder of Turner's book is an account of what changed, why and how.
A central thread in this change is Stewart Brand. "From Counterculture to Cyberculture" is not a biography of the Whole Earth Catalog founder, but it underscores the pressing need for one. Turner emphasizes the effect on young Brand of the theories of mathematician and cybernetics pioneer Norbert Wiener. It was Brand's complete familiarity with cybernetics that ushered him into the company of New York City's avant-garde. Brand, also a dab hand at technology, manned "strobe lights, light projectors, tape decks, stereo speakers, slide sorters" for performance-art "be-ins" designed by USCO, a '60s art collective north of Manhattan. He soon would take the fundamentally cybernetic idea of using "products of technocratic industry ... as handy tools for transforming their viewers' collective mind-set" to the West Coast and novelist Ken Kesey's Merry Pranksters."
2. Tim Rayner:
"One idea that stood out for me in Wikinomics was the notion of the ‘prosumer’. A prosumer is an individual who participates in producing the content that they thereupon consume. Tapscott and Williams use the term to encompass a wide range of co-creators, including product hackers, bedroom DJs and remix artists. I am convinced that the idea could be (and should be) applied broadly to refer to the cultural class of social media consumers.
Social media is the realm of the prosumer. By posting, tweeting, commenting, liking and most importantly sharing on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and LinkedIn, we collectively produce common pools of content that we consume.
The more I thought about prosumers, the more I came to wonder where this cultural form emerged from. Prosumers seemed to have erupted onto the cultural landscape in the noughties with the rise of Facebook and Twitter. But virtual communities that participate in creating common pools of content clearly predate these sites. Fred Turner’s brilliant study of the memetic connections between the hacker movement and the 60s counterculture (embodied in the ambassadorial figure of Stewart Brand) brought things into focus for me. I realized that the prosumer culture implicit in social media originally came into its own in the free software movement of the 1980s and ’90s. We can trace its lineage back to the 60s communes, where the uneasy mix of libertarianism and communalism that characterises both hackerdom and social media prosumerism initially was developed." (http://philosophyforchange.wordpress.com/2012/11/07/five-books-that-shaped-my-thinking/)
Interview
From the IDC mailing list, the questions are by Andrew Keen.
What were the ideological and cultural roots of the Silicon Valley computer revolution?
There are two roots, one military and one cultural. Contrary to popular accounts, in which the counterculture brings us the PC, I've argued that a large part of the counterculture in fact emerges out of a celebration of the same cold war military-industrial research culture that brought us the computer. Folks like Stewart Brand and many others actually embraced cybernetics and collaborative research practice as the basis of a new form of living and working, and of the largest commune movement in American history. In this vision, small scale tools ranging from computers to LSD serve as technologies with which to enhance consciousness. This enhancement in turn allows for the creation of new kinds of communities -- without the hassles of politics or the possibility of falling into hierarchy and orthodoxy. This vision ultimately brought us the notion that computers could be personally transformative technologies, that computer-mediated communication served as a "virtual community," and that cyberspace was an "electronic frontier."
Why do think so many people in the counter culture were attracted by the potential of the computer to turn the world upside down?
They hoped for a world linked by consciousness and communication. When the commune movement built around that idea collapsed in the early 1970s, many were still in the Bay area and began to work in the computer industries. By the early 1980s, thanks specifically to Brand and others, they had begun to reimagine computers in terms first set by LSD twenty years earlier.
How do you define the concept of "digital utopianism" and how has it (re)shaped Silicon Valley and the computer industry?
Digital utopianism is a complex thing, but the gist of it runs something like: new digital technologies are modelling and putting into practice an open, egalitarian social world in which individuals, corporations and states will have equal powers, in which networks rather than hierarchies will be the dominant formation, and in which the world will be saved from the predations of hierarchical governments and firms.
More Information
Presentation and large excerpts at http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/817415.html.