Fred Turner
“Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism”
Lots of ticked pages. I finished reading this last week, but for some reason it’s taken me forever to getting to writing stuff down.
See also:
There’s a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can’t take part, you can’t even tacitly rake part. And you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you’re free, the machine will be prevented from working at all. Mario Savio, December 1964, 11
We are compiling a vocabulary and a syntax that is able to describe in a single language all kinds of phenomenon that have escaped a common language until now. It is a new universal metaphor. It has more juice in it than previous metaphors: Freud’s dream state, Darwin’s variety, Marx’s progress, or the Age of Aquarius. And it has more power than anything else in science at the moment. In fact the computational metaphor may eclipse mathematics as a form of universal notation. Kevin Kelly, 15
With this new ‘magetachnics’ the dominant minority will create a uniform, all–enveloping, super–planetary structure, designed for automatic operation. Instead of functioning actively as an autonomous personality, man will become a passive, purposeless, machine–conditioned animal whose proper functions, as technicians now interpret man’s role, will either be fed into the machine or strictly limited and controlled for the benefit of de–personalized, collective organizations. Lewis Mumford, The Myth of the Machine, 29
Beware of leaders, heroes, organizers. Watch that stuff. Beware of structure freaks. They do not understand. We know the system doesn't work because we're living in it's ruins. We know that leaders don't work out becuse they have all led us only to the present, the good leaders equally with the bad… What the system calls organization—linear organization—is a systematic cage, arbitrarily limiting the possible. It's never worked before. It always produced the present.Published by Seed, an underground San Francisco paper, 36
— Charles Reich’s The Greening of America 37
— Marshall McLuhan’s The Gutenberg Galaxy (“asserted that mankind was leaving a typographic age and entering an electronic one”) 53
To journalists like Ed McClanahan, writing in Esquire magazine, it appeared that “the whole diffuse business [of the Whole Earth Catalog] was held together by some mysterious principle of internal dynamics, some inscrutable law of metaphysics which I simply didn’t understand, which no one who hadn’t actually been close to the very center of the entire Whole Earth operation could even begin to define.” Nearly forty years later, that law looks less like an abstract principle of metaphusics than the product of Stewart Brand’s network entrepreneurship and the convergence of systems theory and New Communalist politics that it facilitated. 71
For the members of the Lama Foundation, as for the Transcendentalists of New England, “The essence of spirituality was practicality.” 75
I always thought tools were objects, things: Screw drivers, wrenches, aces, hoes. Now I relaize that tools are a process: using the right–sized and shaped object in the most effective way to get a job done. A reader–written letter printed in the Whole Earth Catalog, 83
They were not simply tools to do a job; they were mechanisms that transformed their users into actors in the dramatic myths of American individualism. The readers of the Catalog, the nature of these items hinted, might be exceptional individuals, might be part of a vanguard, might in fact be able to merge consumption and technology with the dream of pre–industrial community. 93
Page 102 mentions the story of the infamous Whole Earth demise party, which saw $20,000 given out to people who could come up with good ideas. One of the ideas that got started from this money turned to be the Homebrew Computer Club
In Felsenstein’s words, the Whole Earth Catalog reminded its readers that “you don’t have to leave industrial society, but you don’t have to accept it the way it is.” 114
— “Spacewar: Fanatic Life and Symbolic Death among the Computer Bums”:http://www.wheels.org/spacewar/stone/rolling_stone.html 116
They [computing pioneers] were also inventing a new, collaborative, play–oriented culture. THe programmers and engineers at PARC and Resource One had long distinguished between “hackers” (those who figured things out as they went and invented for pleasure) and “planners” (those who pursued problems according to a ser and less flexible strategy). Brand picked up on this distinction and mapped it onto the larger, New Communalist critique of technocracy. Hackers, he wrote, were not mere “technicians,” byt “a mobile newfound elite, with its own apparatus, language and character, its own legends and humor. Those magnificent men with their flying machines, scouting a leading edge of technology which has an odd softness to it; outlaw country, where rules are not decree or routine so much as the starker demands of what’s possible.” 117
— “The computer itself was the new LSD”, 117
“Self-sufficiency” is an idea which has done more harm than good. On close conceptual examination it is flawed at the root. More importantly, it works badly in practice. Brand, 121
In a series of essays published in a 1972 bestseller entitled Steps to an Ecology of Mind, [Gregory] Bateson outlined a vision of the natural world as a set of information systems in interaction with one another. […] This larger Mind is comparable to God and is perhaps what some people mean by ‘God,’ but it is still immanent in the total interconnected social system and planetary ecology. 123
Bingo.
Bateson’s vision clearly echoed the New Communalist critique of technocracy. Like the former commune dwellers, Bateson offered a new consciousness as an alternative to the destructive, mechanistic forces of the bureaucratic America. Yet he did not call for the establishment of alternative communities. For Bateson, mind was simply present in all social and natural relations. To recognize that immanence and to act in accord with it (and thereby possibly save the world from ecological disaster), individuals need not join an alternative community; they could simply work to influence whatever local “system” in which they found themselves involved. 124
Within the AI Lab, wrote Levy, echoing Stewart Brand’s 1972 piece for Rolling Stone, there were two kinds of workers: planners and hackers. The planners were theoreticians, usually of the mind, who thought of computers as tools that could be used to generate or model information. The hackers focused on the computer systems themselves and on seeing what they could do. Within the lab, a culture clash emerged. 133
I think hackers … are the most interesting and effective body of intellectuals since the framers of the U.S. Constitution. No other group that I know of has set out to liberate a technology and succeeded. They not only did so against the active disinterest of corporate America, their success forces a corporate America to adopt their style in the end. In reorganizing the Information Age around the individual, via personal computers, the hackers may well have saved the American economy. High tech is now something that mass consumers do, rather than just have done to them… The quietest of the ’60s sub–subcultures has emerged as the most innovative and most powerful—and most suspicious of power. 138
In 1989 Gullichsen went so far as to register the word cyberspace as a trademark. In return, William Gibson (who coined the term) trademarked the word Gullichsen. 163
— Mondo 2000 164
— JP Barlow saw an “underlying grammar to nature” in Pierre Teilhard De Chardin and Gregory Bateson. 165
While the marchers of the Free Speech movement attacked the factories of American industry, those facories were bringing forth an unending stream of consumer delights for American youth. This presented college–aged Americans with a predicament: how could they reject the core institutions of American society and yet reatin access to the products of that society and the pleasures they offered? 244
The back–to–the–landers of the New Communalist movement simultaneously turned their backs on the militarized bureaucracy of the state and embraced the systems theories, the technocentric orientation, the emphasis on mind, and the collaborative, experimental sociability that had grown up within it. 245
The commune itself became a social laborator, and daily life an experiment. Social and intellectual boundaries collapsed; each woman or man became her or his own inter-disciplinarian, seeking to build a whole self and a whole world. 245
Now isn’t this just how it should be?
Across the 1970s and 1980s, as the communes of the back–to–the–land movement crumbled and disappeared, Stewart Brand and the entrepreneurs of the Whole Earth group preserved these hopes by welding them to the computer technologies and flexible organizational practices of the rapidly emerging postindustrial economy. 255
The rhetoric of peer–to–peer informationalism, however, much like the rhetoric of consciousness out of which it grew, actively obscures the material and technical infrastructures on which both the Internet and the lives of the difital generation depend. Behing the fantasy of unimpeded information flow lies the reality of millions of plastic keyboards, silicon wafers, glass–faced monitors, and endless miles of cable. All of these technologies depend on manual laborers, first to build them and later to tear them apart. This work remains extraordinarily dangerous, first to those who handle the toxic chemicals required in manufacture and later to those who live on the land, drink the water, and breathe the air into which those chemicals eventually leak. These tasks also continue to be the province of those who lack social and financial resources. In the mid–1980s, for instance, the Immigration and Naturalization Service estimated that 25 percent of the overall Silicon Valley workforce—approximately two hundred thousand workers—consisted of illegal aliens, many if not most of whom worked in manufacturing. In the same period, 75 percent of all Silicon Valley assemblers were women, many from the Third World. In recent years, both manufacturing and recycling have migrated overseas. And once again, women and the poor find themselves disproportionally engaged in high–risk work. Unprotected by American laws, factory hands in China and elsewhere labor eighteen hours a day at wages that often hover around thirty cents per hour building new computers. In China, India, Pakistan, and the Philippines, workers earn similar wages breaking apart computers with their bare hands to salvage the parts within.26 260
Footnote 26: “Hayes, Behind the Silicon Curtain, 23, 54; Rogers and Larsen, Silicon Valley Fever, 144; Schoenberger, Where computers go to die.”
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