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.

Fascinating central argument connecting 60s counterculture to the Internet, well researched, well written, insightful, etc. The one thing I felt was missing was more of a critique of the way the capitalist 90s didn’t always embody the utopian vision of the 60s.

the approach to the “counterculture” part was a bit too superficial. I would have liked to read more about the artistic aspects of the digital revolution. also the book is overall pretty repetitive.

Lackawanna: 303.4833 TURNER Valley Community Library Stacks
Author: Turner, Fred
Publisher: University of Chicago Press, 2006.
ISBN: 0226817415

If there's an iconic figure of the 21st century, it's the technological entrepreneur. You know the type, the saavy, cool, cutting-edge, networked, leveraged, foresighted thought leader. The kind of person who makes a lot of money by not doing better than the competition, but by blazing whole new economic sectors. That figure is a kind of mediated chimera in the mold of the Original, the central subject of this book, one Stewart Brand.



Turner's book is an intellectual career of Brand, from itinerant avanta-garde son et luminere artist, to his major success of the Whole Earth Catalog, to the WELL community, and finally Brand's ascension to the sage of Wired, and the entire Bay Area techster lifestyle. It's a long and somewhat convoluted journey, interspersed with some pretty dense science and technology studies jargon, and with a few leaps of faith. It is also a masterpiece of scholarship, and a great example of what an STS book should do.

For Americans in the 1950s and 1960s, the computer had a singular, sinister vision. Computerization was the logic of dehumanization, of doomsday. Psychologically fragmented 'organization men' served as cogs in a horrific machine, which gobbled up nature and culture in its juggernaut like roll towards nuclear annihilation. The actual practice of computer engineering (intimately tied to defense via the needs of the SAGE air defense network and aerospace miniaturization) was actually rather open, interdisciplinary, and innovative, albeit behind barbed wire fences and security clearances. This was the culture that created Nobert Weiner's cybernetics and Claude Shannon's information theory, along with Buckminster Fuller's radical designs.

There's little in Brand's childhood that distinguished him as a future radical; A midwestern suburban youth, Stanford, Army ROTC, a brief stint in the Rangers, and a job as military photographer. But when he mustered out, with a deep feeling that 'this could not go on', he fell into the emergent counterculture. The first influence was the USCO media art collective, which combined experiments with light and sound with psychedelic drugs, but Brand made contacts everywhere. Turner distinguishes two major threads in 60s politics. The New Left were hardheaded organizers, working against racism and the Vietnam War with actions that confronted the American system. The New Communalism, which Brand became a part of, took an entirely different attitude towards social change.

For New Communalism, politics itself was the problem, and consciousness was the solution. By changing minds, individually and then en mass, the counterculture could simply float out of American society. Music, aesthetics, drugs, meditation, and a return to the land symbolized a chance to break free. Brand's genius was the Whole Earth Catalog, a sprawling publication that presented the building blocks of the New Communalism between its covers, juxtaposing books, homesteading essentials, and the latest electronics as 'tools for thinking more clearly'.

The Whole Earth Catalog was an outlandish success, winning awards and selling millions of copies. Xerox PARC stocked it's library by getting one of everything in the WEC. PARC has a much better claim on building the digital modernity than anyone in Turner's book, see Markoff's What The Dormouse Said for details. But as Brand's star ascended, the New Communalism collapsed, as thousands of communes failed under the gritty problems of subsistence farming, separating from the American economy, and predatory charismatic leaders and various kinds of bums.

Many members of the New Communalist movement went back to various square jobs, but they stayed in touch, a loose network around the Bay Area. Brand himself kept publishing and operated a small non-profit foundation focused on various artistic and technological ideas. In 1985, Brand organized the WELL, the Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link, a message board server that linked together many of his friends and contacts in a personal computing-centric version of the New Communalism.

The personal computer and networking were the technologies that Brand had been waiting for his entire life, the tools that would enable a person to craft an entirely new identity in a world free from the obsolete governments and ideologies of the past. Brand managed a simultaneous double jump at this point. On one side, he managed to cash in, founding the Global Business Network consultancy firm, an exclusive, corporate-centric, and for-profit version of the WELL vision. For the radicals, he also helped organize the first hacker conference in 1984, bringing together the old idealists of the 1960s with the next generation of entrepreneurs and programmers, gathering hippies, ruthless capitalists along the lines of Bill Gates, and semi-criminal computer crackers going by arcane message board handles handles.

Turner's story closes out with Wired magazine, and the embrace of the new business friendly high-tech cyber utopianism by Newt Gingrich. His story ends just before the first dotcom crash, and the 21st century world of FAANGs, monopolistic platforms, app stores, the sharing economy, meme warfare, and all the other problems of the late 2010s.

Turner is up front about the seductive power of Brand's vision. These days, when PCs are pocket sized and John Berry Barlow's cyberspace frontier fenced in by tech titans, it's easy to sneer. But Brand imagined a better world, and with great humor and self-effacement, brought together the people who made it happen. Stewart Brand is not exactly a household name, yet he's indirectly responsible what makes my household different than my parent's household (and yes, my mom does have a paper copy of The Last Whole Earth Catalog on a shelf somewhere). At the same time, the important parts of Brand's vision never real worked. Consciousness may have been raised temporarily, but it always fell back to earth. Most of the new communities failed almost instantaneously. In practice, these new pioneers were very male and very white, same as the last bunch. The web was commercialized, and the ungoverned spaces are not democratic forums, but nightmarish collective ids; our darkest desires for violence, drugs, and illicit pornography made real.

A few decades on, the legacy of digital utopianism is a clearly one of collapse into incoherence. But what saves this book is the grace of love. Turner loves his subject, he loves the possibilities, and that love shines through. There are more adjectives than a typical academic editor would allow, and that's something I love. Turner shows how it's possible to offer critique without being critical.