A fascinating look into the history of the internet, centered around the life and times of Stewart Brand. I had not heard of Brand before this book, and feel that the book presents his life in an idealised manner. I found some segments fascinating, whilst others seemed very inconsequential, with many names and connections mentioned that never seemed hugely relevant. Nonetheless, the story, from LSD-fuelled commune trips to burgeoning start of the modern internet, is very interesting, and well worth exploring further.

If you ever listen to people with advanced degrees in English, you'll hear things like "narrative context", "semiotics", and "the rhetoric of making a difference." For the most part, it's all crap. This book is written by a guy with an advanced degree in English, yet it is completely readable and shows how things like narrative context can lose the scare quotes and actually be important to the way our world develops.

That said, you should have a strong interest in either the counterculture movement of the sixties or the development of nineties cyberculture (especially the Well and Wired magazine) if you plan on picking up this book.

Here is an  interview  with the author.

Pretty interesting summary of how many of the household names of cyberculture got to fame and power. And most of the critique regarding journalistic ethics and libertarianism is also spot on. The writing tends to be a bit dry & repetitive at times, but if you're interested in the history of net culture it's definitely worth a read.

Some nostalgia value for me, having been in the software world through much of the period, but for the most part I found it no more than a plodding exercise, with little life in it.

Enlightening overview of the historical trajectory of cyberculture and its post-WWII origins. It's a particularly interesting history in itself, even if it weren't also a great explanation for the current ethos of Silicon Valley. Brand deftly wove his countercultural/New Communalist vision (springing from the same military-academic-industrial research labs that ironically was part of the genesis of the nuclear-holocaust Cheerful Robot hell they shunned) with computer technologies -- and ultimately New Right ideologies. It shows how fundamental rhetoric-building was to the direction of digital technologies, and how fundamentally political information technology has always been and continues to be. Only downside is that it can be a bit repetitive and long-winded; still, fascinating read.

Particularly interesting parts: the centrality of small-scale, individualist visions for technology; the religious metaphors of disembodied communion and transcendence; the positing of Whole Earth readers as "gods" who "might as well get good at it"; the development and enactment of network theory; the confusion of liberty with deregulation; the insufficiency of "apolitical" escapist "lifestyles"; the tendency of elitist nonhierarchies to perpetuate the same social and economic pressures they are attempting to escape from.

Turner presents a clear articulation of the rhetorical and ideological history of Silicon Valley, drawing a direct line of influence from counterculture communalism all the way through to = utopian visions of the early internet’s potential for social empowerment and connection at small and intimate scales. He also accounts for the sometimes paradoxical focus on neoliberal individualism and communal openness expressed by technologists. As such, Turner’s work holds up as useful primer for unpacking the rhetoric and ideology behind ongoing political and market forces that continue to play out in Silicon Valley battles involving companies like AirBNB and Uber. Turner also describes at length the “cultural entrepreneurialism” work of this network, acting not as journalists, but as what will later become known as “thought leaders,” “influencers,” “gurus” of technology culture, publishing their ideas and shaping the cultural discourse.

Repetitive at times, the seams of stitched together academic papers show through from chapter to chapter. And though focused on revealing the importance of a political and cultural ideology within a network of people, Turner tells the story from the perspective of the lone genius entrepreneur. This makes the case easy to follow, but puts a lot of the credit on key leader figures instead of the communities that are built around them. No doubt, these leaders had and continue to have operative roles in shaping the discourse and the networks they built up, but as a structuring and narrative lens, it now feels incomplete or lopsided to focus primarily on the many published manifestoes of those voices.

Robert Malone/ New Yorker

Dove right into this after reading John Markoff's "What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry." I appreciated the focus on Stewart Brand as well as the timeline that took us from "The Whole Earth Catalog" to "Wired." Turner and Markoff's books are written for different audiences, the latter more a popular audience, the former more academic. That doesn't excuse the high degree of repetition throughout Turner's book, though, which ultimately seemed to just repeat, rather than significantly develop, the same basic observation.

Turner's book, for its part, was an occasionally fascinating and often troubling read (particularly looking back at this book from 2023 to 2006, just on the other side of the new millennialism that the book sketches out). I think the "digital utopianism" deserved a far stronger critique than we got here, a need more sharply in focus with the rise of social media and the overt alignments evident between social media magnates and authoritarianism and white supremacy. And Turner's approach to libertarian and entrepreneurial values shed light on some of the issues that I see with those desiring to craft out a personal destiny by being influencers and online personalities at the expense of their engagement with the political, social/cultural, and ecological (a pesky triad indeed!) spheres undergoing such monumental stressors in the current moment.

The Stewart Brand through-line was occasionally useful but also not entirely convincing. What the use of Brand does, more than anything, is consolidate the most damaging mythos of Silicon Valley -- that it requires the mythologizing of white male centralized libertarian power-figures/visionaries who show that the decentralized "network" actually tends toward the formation of likeminded power clusters at the expense of social justice, equity, and accessibility. Turner's emphasis on Brand (as tenuous as it sometimes is in the book) merely reinforces this toxic legacy of the computing guru.

Turner's prose often had me glazing over with frequent use of triads in sentences (e.g., "In its meetings, its publications, and its presentations, GBN offered those individuals a vision of the New Economy as a networked entity, open to management by elite social groups and charismatic leaders and linked by interpersonal and informational networks, an entity whose laws could be made visible through a mix of systems theory, collaborative social practice, and mystical insight" (184)), and a tendency to pair things up with an "on the one hand" and "on the other hand." On the one hand, I found myself invested in the book, and on the other, feeling kind of distanced and uninvested in its outcome.

A bit dull, but well worth reading. It's one of those books that really helps clarify where we are and how we got here. It answers a question that I hadn't thought to ask: How did the culture of computing become so closely allied with a self-contradictory mix of anti-authoritarian politics and communitarian ethos, after being identified with the military and large corporations in the 1950s and 1960s?

This is history at its best. If you've ever been at all curious about the roots of modern Silicon Valley culture - its utopianism, its corporate organization, its ideals - this book will explain all that and more, in remarkably engaging prose for an academic text. Turner provides a convincing narrative for some of the strangest transformations in modern American culture: the influence of the Merry Pranksters on Newt Gingrich, the connections between cybernetics and the hippies. He retains careful awareness, but not in an overbearing way, of the hypocrisies and exclusionary aspects of the cultures examined. And above all he is conscious of the way in which cultures can be actively shaped and molded, can come to define themselves and others, by people like Stewart Brand. He also has no patience for the modern fad in history of science for describing the ways in which science is "socially constructed" - this is a cultural, not epistemic reading of the course of science and technology.
The book, like many academic histories, starts out slow, but it gathers steam quickly and the last few chapters are mind-boggling. Note that it only goes up to the boom (1999).

tl;dr Fantastic and eye-opening piece of cultural and technological history.

Doporučuje Matěj Schneider

This is a really dense and useful book that is rightly cited frequently to explain the libertarian infrastructure of the internet. Turner follows Stewart Brand and others associated with the Whole Earth Catalog through the beginning of "hacker" culture and concludes with the history of Wired magazine. The argument builds slowly, but the final two chapters could probably be read on their own for anyone seeking to get a quick distillation of the argument about the connections between goals of "new communalists" of the 1960s-1970s counterculture, 1990s techno-utopians and the merger of these groups with the anti-regulutory agenda of the New Right.