From Counterculture to Cyberculture

Book on the rise of tech utopianism

• In one of the most widely read business manuals of the 1990s, New Rules for the New Economy, Kelly explained that "the principles governing the world of the soft-the world of intangibles, of media, of software, and of services-will soon command the world of the hard-the world of reality, of atoms, of objects, of steel and oil, and the hard work done by the sweat of brows."
• If the American state deployed massive weapons systems in order to destroy faraway peoples, the New Communalists would deploy small-scale technologies-ranging nologies-ranging from axes and hoes to amplifiers, strobe lights, slide projectors, jectors, and LSD-to bring people together and allow them to experience their common humanity. Finally, if the bureaucracies of industry and government ernment demanded that men and women become psychologically fragmented mented specialists, the technology-induced experience of togetherness would allow them to become both self-sufficient and whole once again.