From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital

Reading about counterculture era, the terms associated would be anti-government, anti-establishment, anti-programming, anti-war. An era of rebellion. It was also the search and desire of freedom; freedom of choice, lifestyle and expression.

Reading this book there are 2 points which are for me to reflect based on my understanding:

"Society is increasing jobless but not workless". It is the description of the gig economy with the redefinition and requirement for full time staff in an organization. While then it was only in small roles and tasks, fast forward to today, with technology as the biggest disruptor to traditional business, who really are the staff? Taxi companies replaced with Uber and other app hailing company as well as Airbnb, the world largest chain of property rental (yet don't employ anyone to handle the physical management of properties and on ground services). It gives me fresh perspective on the unemployment numbers. Yet it is also to know that being paid for work done, means small income for most, a lack of stability and widening of income gap.

The other was about journalism. As the tech group was writing and contribute more into different news channels and publications, it is said they fall well outside the description of professional journalism and its ethics. Reporting and creating news are two different matters. A message to me that the role of journalism and ethics had changed over the years. It is a reminder of ethics of old is not applicable to the world of today and future. This is not limited to journalism. What is of value and ethics today?

This is a sad story in many ways: I wonder if the author realises quite how sad it is. The story he seems to want to tell is about how the idealism and independence of the American counterculture fed into the burgeoning digital technology industry, infusing the world of early computing with radical, egalitarian ideas. But what actually comes across more strongly than anything is the notion that, even before it got started, Silicon Valley had been thoroughly coopted by right-wing politics and corporate interests.


Newt Gingrich on the cover of Wired, August 1995

Turner's basic argument is that the digital communications world was always a hybrid of two different legacies – ‘that of the military-industrial research culture, which first appeared during World War II and flourished across the cold war era, and that of the American counterculture’. Where the prevailing narrative sees 1960s youth culture as a rejection of the cold war world, Turner instead goes to great (possibly tedious) lengths to demonstrate that, in fact, ‘the communards of the back-to-the-land movement often embraced the collaborative social practices, the celebration of technology, and the cybernetic rhetoric of mainstream military-industrial-academic research.’

Symbolising this productive mixture, in Turner's view, is the mercurial writer-cum-businessman-cum-futurist Stewart Brand, who spent the 1960s as one of Ken Kesey's Merry Pranksters, and, now aged 77, is still going strong as an active director of various eco-technological think-tanks and quangoes. His major work was the Whole Earth Catalog, an odd, of-its-time publication which combined articles on self-sufficiency with mail-order listings for a range of inspirational books, DIY tools, frontiersman clothing, and assorted accoutrements. It was popular with hippies and commune-dwellers – and, because it depended on user contributions for its reviews and editorials, it also became enormously influential among those who would go on to build the new technological world. Steve Jobs, for instance, called the Whole Earth Catalog ‘one of the bibles of my generation…sort of like Google in paperback form’.


Some pages from the Whole Earth Catalog…‘an overflow of information’

It's hard to overstate the adulation with which the kind of people who read the Catalog greeted the emergence of microcomputers and digital communications. For them, the interconnectedness of an online world offered ‘the image of an ideal society: decentralized, egalitarian, harmonious, and free’. It was an optimistic, quintessentially American (as I see it) idealism which was enshrined in the first online communities like The WELL, in companies like Apple, and which was communicated to the world by Wired magazine – for all of whom

the Internet, and digital communication generally, stood as the prototype of a newly decentralized, nonhierarchical society linked by invisible bits in a single harmonious network. […C]yberspace offered what LSD, Christian mysticism, cybernetics, and countercultural “energy” theory had all promised: transpersonal communion.

However, it turned out that this vision of self-sufficiency and entrepreneurship with minimal government interference was – as Turner puts it – ‘in many ways quite congenial to the insurgent Republicans of the 1990s’. Right-wingers began organising digital conferences, pallying up to the big names, and in return winning approbation and promotion from the digital community. And unfortunately, just as the countercultural call for ‘responsibility for the people’ was taken up by Republicans, so also was a general turning away from the poor and disadvantaged, and indeed away from non-white populations, that had characterised many of the countercultural projects like the back-to-the-land movement.

The result of all this was that, yes, the digital revolution was always dominated by ideas of self-sufficiency and non-regulation; but it was also always dominated by the welcoming of corporate control and by a generally white male technocratic sensibility, with all the positive and negative connotations those things imply.

It's definitely an important story, but to be honest I felt I had to work a little too hard to make it out in this book. I was never really convinced of Stewart Brand's central importance to the whole tale, and some chapters just seemed to devolve into lists of dates and people who worked with him on various tangentially-related projects. I had never heard of Brand before, and perhaps if you already know about him then you don't need to be told why he matters; I did, and I wasn't.

This was recommended to me over What the Dormouse Said, a book which came out at the same time and which tells a similar story – I'd be interested to know if that one would have suited me better, because this – although the story it tells is fundamentally interesting – is a bit of a slog.

Overall, I appreciated what this book had to offer. It connects us with how the internet, although originally designed as a tool for the military to respond to a nuclear attack, it was interpreted by the counter culture movement as a potential tool to unite society.

Reboot-core/canon! Really really interesting look at the impact of Stewart Brand's evangelism and the industry's ties to the counterculture

Centred on the good ole USA.

While some of the story around “wired” magazine seemed not atypical of any magazine and there are large areas missing that cover more recent perspectives in Cyberculture this text is very well researched and inspiring in its insight as to the special combination of values that shape Cyberculture.

The rebels against centralisation live in close relationship to the centralised system and its tools. These intrinsic contradictions should get us to appreciate and be ready to accept that the world is always more complicated than our ideas make of it.

Well written, just not into history of tech as much as I am the broader history of science.

Funny thing: after reading this book, the concept (and accompanying image) of conservative/libertarian Grover Norquist going to Burning Man no longer seemed so outlandish and out of character to me. Creepy.