From Counterculture to Cyberculture

Book on the rise of tech utopianism

Quotes

• Whole Earth Catalogue - Together, they came to argue that technologies should be small-scale, should support the development of individual consciousness, and therefore should be both informational and personal.
• For college students of his time, the imagined gray mass of the Soviet Army was a mirror image of the army of gray flannel nel men who marched off to work every morning in the concrete towers of American industry. The soldier in his uniform was simply another form of what sociologist William Whyte called the "Organization Man."5 Cut off from his emotions, trained to follow a chain of command, the Soviet soldier and the American middle manager alike seemed to many to be little more than worker bees inside ever-growing hives of military-industrial bureaucracy.
• How did a social movement devoted to critiquing the technological bureaucracy of the cold war come to celebrate the socio-technical visions that animated that bureaucracy? And how is it that the communitarian ideals of the counterculture should have become melded to computers and computer networks in such a way that thirty years later, the Internet could appear to so many as an emblem of a youthful revolution reborn?
• In this way the Macy meetings helped transform cybernetics into one of the dominant intellectual paradigms of the postwar era.
• For the marchers of the Free Speech movement, disembodiment-that is, the transformation of the self into data on an IBM card-marked the height of dehumanization. For Kelly, Dyson, and Barlow, however, it marked the route to new forms of equality and communion. Somehow, somewhere, disembodiment had come to be seen as a route to a more holistic life.
• 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.