Research: From Counter Culture to Cyber Culture (Saito)

by the end of the 1960s, some elements of the counterculture, and particularly that segment of it that headed back to the land, had begun to explicitly embrace the systems visions circulating in the research world of the cold war. But how did those two worlds come together? How did a social movement devoted to critiquing the technologi- cal 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 com- puter networks in such a way that thirty years later, the Internet could ap- pear to so many as an emblem of a youthful revolution reborn?

http://p2pfoundation.net/New_Communalism - communes in the 60’s back to the land people, against the (technological) bureacracy of the cold war (individualism, progression, [wild west]) (building communities, while including individualism).

For answers to these questions, we need to turn to the biography of Stewart Brand and the history of the Whole Earth network.

In the mid-1990s, as first the Internet and then the World Wide Web swung into public view, talk of revolution filled the air. Politics, eco- nomics, the nature of the self—all seemed to teeter on the edge of transformation. The Internet was about to “flatten organizations, globalize society, decentralize control, and help harmonize people,” as MIT’s Nicholas Negroponte put it.1 The stodgy men in gray flannel suits who had so confidently roamed the corridors of industry would shortly disappear, and so too would the chains of command on which their authority depended. In their place, wrote Negroponte and dozens of others, the Internet would bring about the rise of a new “digital generation”—playful, self-sufficient, psychologically whole— and it would see that generation gather, like the Net itself, into col- laborative networks of independent peers.2 States too would melt away, their citizens lured back from archaic party-based politics to the “natural” agora of the digitized marketplace. Even the individual self, so long trapped in the human body, would finally be free to step out- side its fleshy confines, explore its authentic interests, and find others with whom it might achieve communion. Ubiquitous networked computing had arrived, and in its shiny array of interlinked devices, pundits, scholars, and investors alike saw the image of an ideal society: decentralized, egalitarian, harmonious, and free. But how did this happen? Only thirty years earlier, computers had been the tools and emblems of the same unfeeling industrial-era social machine whose collapse they now seemed ready to bring about. In the winter of 1964, for instance, students marching for free speech at the University of California at Berkeley feared that America’s politi- cal leaders were treating them as if they were bits of abstract data.

How was it, then, that computers and computer networks became linked to visions of peer-to-peer ad-hocracy, a leveled marketplace, and a more au- thentic self ? Where did these visions come from? And who enlisted com- puting machines to represent them?

To answer these questions, this book traces the previously untold history of an extraordinarily influential group of San Francisco Bay area journalists and entrepreneurs: Stewart Brand and the Whole Earth network. Between the late 1960s and the late 1990s, Brand assembled a network of people and publications that together brokered a series of encounters between bo- hemian San Francisco and the emerging technology hub of Silicon Valley to the south. In 1968 Brand brought members of the two worlds together in the pages of one of the defining documents of the era, the Whole Earth Catalog. In 1985 he gathered them again on what would become perhaps the most influential computer conferencing system of the decade, the Whole Earth ’Lectronic Link, or the WELL. Throughout the late 1980s and early 1990s, Brand and other members of the network, including Kevin Kelly, Howard Rheingold, Esther Dyson, and John Perry Barlow, became some of the most-quoted spokespeople for a countercultural vision of the Internet. In 1993 all would help create the magazine that, more than any other, depicted the emerging digital world in revolutionary terms: Wired.

By recounting their history, this book reveals and helps to explain a com- plex intertwining of two legacies: that of the military-industrial research cul- ture, which first appeared during World War II and flourished across the cold war era, and that of the American counterculture.

To Stewart Brand and later to other members of the Whole Earth group, cybernetics also presented a set of social and rhetorical resources for entre- preneurship. In the early 1960s, not long after graduating from Stanford University, Brand found his way into the bohemian art worlds of San Fran- cisco and New York. Like many of the artists around him at the time, and like Norbert Wiener, in whose writings on cybernetics they were im- mersed, Brand quickly became what sociologist Ronald Burt has called a “network entrepreneur.”7 That is, he began to migrate from one intellectual community to another and, in the process, to knit together formerly sepa- rate intellectual and social networks. In the Whole Earth Catalog era, these networks spanned the worlds of scientific research, hippie homesteading, ecology, and mainstream consumer culture. By the 1990s they would in- clude representatives of the Defense Department, the U.S. Congress, global corporations such as Shell Oil, and makers of all sorts of digital software and equipment.

Often enough, the systems on which network members appeared became models in their own right of these new understandings. Even when they did not, members often took the insights they had gleaned back into their social and professional worlds. In this way ideas born within Whole Earth–derived network forums became key frames through which both public and professional technologists sought to comprehend the potential social impact of information and infor- mation technologies. Over time, the network’s members and forums helped redefine the microcomputer as a “personal” machine, computer communi- cation networks as “virtual communities,” and cyberspace itself as the digi- tal equivalent of the western landscape into which so many communards set forth in the late 1960s, the “electronic frontier.”

In Wiener’s own words, disorganization and randomness, whether in the realm of information or in the realm of politics, was something “which without too violent a figure of speech we may con- sider evil.”42 Information systems, in part simply by virtue of being systems, exemplified organization. What is more, because of their feedback mecha- nisms, Wiener believed they sought to maintain order within themselves. In both senses, Wiener viewed information systems as sources of moral good. Moreover, to an America that had just spent five years combating a dictato- rial German regime and that would soon confront a new dictator in the per- son of Joseph Stalin, a systems view of information offered an appealingly nonhierarchical model of governance and power. Cybernetic systems as Wiener saw them were self-regulating and complete in and of themselves, at least in theory. They had only to process information by means of their constituent parts and respond to the feedback offered, and order would emerge. Embedded in Wiener’s theory of society as an information system was a deep longing for and even a model of an egalitarian, democratic social order. To the readers of Cybernetics, computers may have threatened au- tomation from above, but they also offered metaphors for the democratic creation of order from below.

More recently, analysts of digital utopianism have dated the communitarian rhetoric surrounding the intro- duction of the Internet to what they have imagined to be a single, authenti- cally revolutionary social movement that was somehow crushed or co-opted by the forces of capitalism.75 By confusing the New Left with the counter- culture, and the New Communalists with both, contemporary theorists of digital media have often gone so far as to echo the utopians of the 1990s and to reimagine its peer-to-peer technologies as the rebirth in hardware and software of a single, “free” culture that once stood outside the main- stream and can do so again.76

In the Brand household, technologies of communication and travel presented vistas of individual and national progress. Both radio sets and rocket ships connected the Brand family to a universe beyond midsized, middle-class, midwestern Rockford.

Brand’s search for individual freedom led to a decade-long migration among a wide variety of bohemian, scientific, and academic communities. In the course of these travels, Brand encountered both communal ways of living and a series of technocentric, systems-oriented theories that served as ideo- logical supports for communalism. Often enough, the theories themselves were not explicitly theories of social organization so much as theories of local social practices, such as how to make art or how to take LSD or how to run a business meeting. As he moved among these communities, how- ever, and later, when his Whole Earth Catalog became a forum in which such communities met, Brand began to see how the systems orientation of Paul Ehrlich’s population biology, combined with new, countercultural modes of living, might offer an appealingly individualistic lifestyle—not only for him, but also for anyone else who could abandon the halls of bureaucratic America.

The same tension between global humanist ideals and local elite practice would haunt much of the New Communalist movement over the next de- cade, and the Whole Earth network for years after that. But in the early 1960s, the linking of the global and the local helped account for much of Marshall McLuhan’s appeal within the emerging counterculture. McLuhan’s simultaneous celebration of new media and tribal social forms allowed people like Stewart Brand to imagine technology itself as a tool with which to resolve the twin cold war dilemmas of humanity’s fate and their own tra- jectory into adulthood. That is, McLuhan offered a vision in which young people who had been raised on rock and roll, television, and the associated pleasures of consumption need not give those pleasures up even if they re- jected the adult society that had created them. Even if the social order of technocracy threatened the species with nuclear annihilation and the indi- vidual young person with psychic fragmentation, the media technologies produced by that order offered the possibility of individual and collective transformation. McLuhan’s dual emphases also allowed young people to imagine the local communities they built around these media not simply as communities built around consumption of industrial products, but as model communities for a new society. In McLuhan’s writing, and in the artistic practice of groups like USCO and, later, the psychedelic practices of groups like San Francisco’s Merry Pranksters, technologies produced by mass, Stewart Brand Meets the Cybernetic Counterculture [ 55 ] industrial society offered the keys to transforming and thus to saving the adult world.

Brand = New Communalist ideals + the ideological and technological products of cold war technocracy. (67)

Brand later argued that to the extent that the Whole Earth Catalog reflected a particular “theory of civilization,” it was a theory developed on the com- munes.

Yet even as they set out to escape mainstream technocratic society, founders of the intentional communities of the Southwest embraced the technophilic, consciousness-oriented value systems that Brand had encoun- tered earlier in USCO and among the Merry Pranksters and, beyond them, though less explicitly, the collaborative research culture of cold war Amer- ica. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, intentional communities tended to be organized along one of two lines: either free-flowing anarchy or rigid, usu- ally religious, social order.9 Both types of communities, however, embraced the notion that small-scale technologies could transform the individual con- sciousness and, with it, the nature of community. They also celebrated the imagery of the American frontier. Many communards saw themselves as latter-day cowboys and Indians, moving out onto the open plains in order to find a better life.10

Married to the frontier rhetoric of “cowboys and Indians,” systems theory offered Whole Earth read- ers a way to link their countercultural attempts to transform themselves and their communities to the trajectory of American myth. Like its New Com- munalist audience, the Catalog celebrated small-scale technologies—and, again, itself—as ways for individuals to improve their lives. But it also of- fered up those tools—and itself—as prototypes of a new relationship be- tween the individual, information, and technology. Like the scientific en- trepreneurs of MIT’s Rad Lab, the New Communalist adventurers of the Whole Earth Catalog were to become independent, collaborative, and mo- bile, and they were to build the norms of their communities into technolo- gies and information systems that would both support those communities and model their ideals to the outside world.

But what kind of world would this new elite build? To the extent that the Whole Earth Catalog serves as a guide, it would be masculine, entrepreneur- ial, well-educated, and white. It would celebrate systems theory and the power of technology to foster social change. And it would turn away from questions of gender, race, and class, and toward a rhetoric of individual and small-group empowerment.

Although it was published in the heyday of the Black Panthers and the American Indian Movement, for instance, the Catalog left questions of race unaddressed. Occasionally an African American would peer out from a pho- tograph in the Catalog or the Supplement, but the first attempt to deal with race explicitly did not come until the January 1970 Supplement, with the printing of a “Black Reading List” from Robin’s Distributing Company.55 Few similar items followed. In the fall of 1974, not long after the Catalog had officially ceased publication, Brand did turn over an issue of the magazine that grew out of the Supplement called CoEvolution Quarterly to the Black Pan- thers to edit as a special issue. The magazine they created simply copied the format of their newsletters, and none of the editors or authors of that issue became regular contributors to Whole Earth productions in later years.

[ 98 ] Chapter 3 Likewise, for all the talk of cowboys and Indians in the Catalog, real Native Americans were virtually invisible in its pages. Represented by buckskin shirts and moccasins, Indians remained little more than symbols for the tribal, wandering hippies.

In 1985, nearly twenty years after it first served the back-to-the-land movement, the Whole Earth Catalog became a model for one of the most influential computer networks to date—the Whole Earth ’Lec- tronic Link (or WELL). Founded by Stewart Brand and computer en- trepreneur Larry Brilliant, the WELL was a teleconferencing system within which subscribers could dial up a central computer and type messages to one another in either asynchronous or real-time conver- sations.1 In its hardware and software it differed little from the many such systems that had begun to appear around the world by this time. But in its membership and its governance, the WELL carried forward a set of ideals, management strategies, and interpersonal networks first formulated in and around the Whole Earth Catalog. Within the WELL’s electronic confines, Stewart Brand brought together former counterculturalists, hackers, and journalists — the same groups he had lately convened at Fort Cronkhite and at the offices of the Whole Earth Software Catalog. These groups collaborated within a network forum that had been shaped by New Communalist and cybernetic ideals. And as they worked together, they established a sense of geographi- cally distributed community much like the one that once united the scattered communes of the back-to-the-land movement.

Thanks to shifts in technology and in the San Francisco Bay area’s econ- omy, the nature and value of the information exchanged on the WELL was qualitatively different. Yet WELL members retained two conceptual frame- works from the Catalog era with which to explain their interactions online:

the “gift economy” and the notion of a community of linked minds. As Howard Rheingold explained it, the WELL’s gift economy consisted of the constant exchange of potentially valuable information without expectation of immediate reward.42 Individuals contributed information to such a sys- tem, wrote Rheingold, because those who contributed would ultimately be rewarded with information themselves over time. This pattern of giving without expectation of immediate reward had deep roots in the San Fran- cisco Bay area counterculture; for Rheingold and others, it was this pattern that distinguished the sorts of information exchange happening in places like the WELL from those of ordinary, cash-and-carry markets.43 As several generations of sociologists and anthropologists have pointed out, though, a gift economy is not simply a system for the exchange of valuable goods. It is also a system for the establishment of social order.44 Marcel Mauss argued in The Gift, his classic study of exchange relations in pre-industrial societies, that there is no such thing as a “pure gift.” Gifts entail obligations and gen- erate cycles of exchange that serve to establish and maintain structural rela- tions between givers and receivers. Moreover, as Mauss suggested, the gift itself never stands outside social or economic relations. The gift encodes multiple social and economic meanings. Pierre Bourdieu has argued that these multiple meanings are an “open secret” to participants in the system. Within the gift itself and within cycles of giving and receiving, the multiple meanings work to transform material wealth into social capital.45

In the late 1980s and the early 1990s, the same economic and techno- logical forces that had long shaped work lives in Silicon Valley swept across much of the industrialized world. Networked forms of produc- tion, contract employment, global outsourcing, and deregulated marketplaces all became common features of everyday economic life. So did the nearly universal use of computers and computer networks in business and, increasingly, in the home. Together, these develop- ments suggested to many at the time, and particularly to politicians and pundits on the right, that a “new economy” had appeared, one in which digital technologies and networked forms of economic organi- zation combined to liberate the individual entrepreneur. In a 1988 speech at Moscow State University, President Ronald Reagan became one of the first to make the case. “In the new economy,” he explained, “human invention increasingly makes physical resources obsolete. We’re breaking through the material conditions of existence to a world where man creates his own destiny.”1

In Out of Control, however, Kelly took pains to show how the Net was above all the symbol of a post-Fordist economic order. One the one hand, Kelly implied, networked systems, and particularly computer systems, would lead humanity back toward a reintegration with nature—an ability to run with the bees, so to speak. On the other hand, he suggested, this re- integration would take place within the heart of the corporate world.

Together, Wired suggested, this digital generation would do what the New Communalists had failed to accomplish: they would tear down hierarchies, undermine the sorts of corporations and governments that had spawned them, and, in the hierarchies’ place, create a peer-to-peer, collaborative society, interlinked by invisible currents of energy and information. By the end of the decade, theirs would be the governing myth of the Internet, the stock market, and great swaths of the New Economy.

This role can be seen most clearly in Wired’s complex relationship with Esther Dyson, libertarian telecommunications analyst George Gilder, and House Speaker Newt Gingrich. Over the magazine’s first two years, these figures became involved in a cycle of mutual legitimation. At Wired, Gilder and Dyson served variously as sources, subjects, and authors of stories, and in August 1995 Dyson interviewed Gingrich for a Wired cover story. These appearances in Wired took place, however, against a background of other collaborations. In August 1994 Gilder invited Dyson to Aspen, Colorado, for a conference sponsored by the Progress and Freedom Foundation, a think tank closely linked to Newt Gingrich. There, along with Ronald Reagan’s former science adviser, George Keyworth, and Alvin Toffler, Gilder and Dyson lent their names to a document featuring what was arguably the de- cade’s most potent rhetorical welding of deregulationist politics to digital technologies, “Cyberspace and the American Dream: A Magna Carta for the Knowledge Age.”32 A year later, while Gingrich’s portrait graced the cover of Wired, Dyson and Gilder returned to the Aspen conference, taking with them John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, and Stewart Brand, as well as bio- nomist Michael Rothschild and representatives from Microsoft, America Online, and Sun Microsystems.

If the “Aspen Summit” was intended to unite the technology industry, representatives of the San Francisco Bay area counterculture, and Republican Washington, it failed. Nevertheless, though that meeting of the minds did not take hold in the mountains, it found a home in Wired. While the summiteers were meeting in Aspen, the August 1995 issue of Wired convened an interview between Es- ther Dyson and Newt Gingrich. In it they engaged in many of the rhetorical flourishes that characterized the “Magna Carta.” Together they depicted the Internet as a model of an ideally decentralized and in many ways de- governmentalized society, and as a tool with which to bring that society about. As Dyson and her coauthors had done in the “Magna Carta,” Gin- grich compared the digital revolution to the birth of the American nation. Looking back on the dot-com bubble’s spectacular collapse, we can be tempted to dismiss the millenarian claims that surrounded the Internet in the 1990s as little more than the cunning hype of those who stood to profit from the building of broadband pipelines, the sale of computers, and the distribution of soon-to-be-worthless stock. But that would be a mistake. Although Kevin Kelly, Peter Schwartz, and Wired magazine certainly helped fuel the raging optimism of the period, their techno- utopian social vision in fact reflected the slow entwining of two far deeper transformations in American society. The first of these was technological. Over the previous forty years, the massive, stand-alone calculating machines of the cold war had become desktop computers, linked to one another in a vast network of communication that reached into almost every corner of the civilian world. This shift in computing technology took place, however, alongside a second, cultural transfor- mation. In the late 1950s, Stewart Brand and others of his generation had come of age fearing that they would soon be absorbed into an un- feeling bureaucracy, a calculating, mechanical form of social organiza- tion that had brought humankind to the edge of nuclear annihilation. Over the ensuing forty years, their attempts to find an alternative to this grim vision of adulthood saw them push back the boundaries of public life and make room for styles of self-expression and collective organiza- tion that had been taboo in much of cold war America.

When they tried to live these ideals, however, the communards discov- ered that embracing systems of consciousness and information as sources of social structure actually amplified their exposure to the social and material pressures they had hoped to escape. When the members of communes such as Drop City freed themselves from the formal structures of government, for example, they quickly suffered from an inability to attend to their own material needs and to form common cause with their neighbors. The first of these difficulties grew directly out of the New Communalist rejection of formal politics. In the absence of formal rule structures, many communes saw questions of leadership and power become questions of charisma. As a result, many suffered from the rise of hostile factions, and some from the appearance of nearly dictatorial gurus. The turn away from formal politics also gave norms that the communards had brought with them from main- stream society an extraordinary governing force. In the absence of institu- tions that might regulate the relations of men and women, many fell back on old customs. Under the guise of social experimentation, for example, many rural communes in particular witnessed the comparative disenfran- chisement of women and children. Like the men of the suburbs whose lives they had rejected, the men of many communes left the cooking and the cleaning and the care of the children to the women.