From Counterculture to Cyberculture

Book on the rise of tech utopianism

Quotes

• juxtaposition is a core element of the cybernetic practice of universal rhetoric and of its ideological component, legitimacy exchange.14 These principles are at work on virtually every page of the Whole Earth Catalog, and in its overarching structure as well. Together they offer a way for the members of the New Communalist movement to claim some of the legitimacy of the American research community. They also work to legitimate mainstream forces of consumption, technological production, and research as hip.
• "At the same time, he intimates that he and the reader are like gods in at least two senses, one local and one global, and both familiar from Buckminster Fuller's Ideas and Integrities and, before that, Norbert Wiener's Cybernetics. On the local level, the individual reader is like a god in having the power to conduct his life as he wishes, as long as he can find the appropriate tools. For Brand, as for Fuller and Wiener, the system of the universe is complete-it is not something thing we can put together, but something already "together" in its own right. At the local level, our job is to turn its energies and resources to our own purposes. In keeping with the countercultural critique of hierarchy, we must pursue our own, individual transformation and the transformation of the world."
• "Every time a white hippie comes in and buys a Chicano's land to escape the fuckin' city, he sends that Chicano to the city to go through what he's trying to escape from, can you dig it? What can you do with that bread out here, man? Nothing. Then when that money's gone, see, the Chicano has to stay in the city, cause now he ain't got no land to come back to. He's stuck, and the hippie's free. That's why they don't dig the fuckin' hippies, man."2
• Race relations echoed patterns found elsewhere in the counterculture. Virtually all of the back-to-the-landers were white, and most were under thirty years of age, well-educated, socially privileged, and financially stable.
• What order obtained on many communes depended less on systems of explicit social control than on social resources and cultural habits imported from the New Communalists' former lives. More than a few communes were built with inherited money and sustained with welfare checks and food stamps. And many commune residents felt at home in large part because they were surrounded by others like themselves.
• In the late 1960s and early 1970s, intentional communities tended to be organized along one of two lines: either free-flowing anarchy or rigid, usually ally religious, social order.9 Both types of communities, however, embraced the notion that small-scale technologies could transform the individual consciousness sciousness and, with it, the nature of community.
• 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.