[SIGCIS-Members] My review of Fred Turner's From Counterculture to Cyberculture

Hello, Julie's contribution reminds me that Isis has just recently published my review of Fred Turner’s book. This is the text I sent (the original was a bit longer) but I thought I should wait for it to be published before sharing it with the list. While I'm here: the guy who reviewed Lars Heide's book seemed rather grumpy! Or rather he didn't have any interest in the use and development of punched card technology except in as much as it might have had a major social impact. So let me add that it is well worth reading and is by far the broadest and deepest account so far published of the evolution of punched card machine applications over a range of countries and industries. In exploring the shaping of technology by users it is an excellent complement to JoAnne Yates' work on punched card use in the insurance industry. If you come across other reviews of interest to readers on the list please feel free to link or forward to our list. Tom Review of From Counterculture to Cyberculture Thomas Haigh, University of Wisconsin--Milwaukee Preprint text -- Published version March 2010 in Isis. Turner’s book is one of the best every written on the history of information technology. It centers on the unlikely career of Stewart Brand, who happily for this purpose personifies the Bay Area’s paradoxical success as America’s central hub for counter-cultural politics, new age fads, and high technology entrepreneurship. Having arrived to study biology at Stanford University Brand soon immersed himself in the emerging countercultural scene. He took acid, hung out with the Merry Pranksters, and organized the multimedia Trips Festivals. In 1968 he started a business to serve the area’s burgeoning population of rural communes. It published the Whole Earth Catalog, which Turner calls a “smorgasbord of books, mechanical devices, and outdoor recreational gear” showcasing items from birch cribs to electronic calculators. Its title reflected Brand’s 1966 campaign to have NASA release a picture of the Earth from space, something he presciently believed would act as a powerful symbol of the world’s fragility and interdependence. The catalog’s eccentric scope and deliberate juxtapositions made it a powerful exemplar of the holistic mindset it promoted. Brand’s slogans of “access to tools” and “whole systems” promised to supply individuals and local communities with the technologies (literal and intellectual) needed to defend themselves against the deadening conformity of government and big business. Journalistic accounts of the origins of personal computing, most recently John Markoff’s disjointed What the Doormouse Said, have celebrated connections between computer enthusiasts and the counterculture without really getting to grips with their substance or asking what the counterculture actually was. Turner argues powerfully for the need to separate the political activism of the New Left from the libertarian lifestyle tinkering of what he calls the New Communalists. More provocatively he suggests that the devotion of Brand and his followers to cybernetics, systems thinking, interdisciplinary collaboration, and ad-hoc non-hierarchical forms of organization did not, as they believed, set them aside from the military-industrial-academic complex of the Cold War. Instead, drawing primarily on characterizations of the MIT Radiation Lab made by Peter Galison and David Mindell, he insists that these values united the counter culture with the elites of the Cold War research world. This argument implies that the book’s title might more accurately be reversed to read “From Cyberculture to Counterculture.” The Whole Earth Catalog ceased publication in 1972, though Brand mined similar territory with successor publications such as CoEvolution Quarterly into the 1980s. As the commune movement fizzled Brand developed a growing interest in computer technology. A failed publication of the 1980s, The Whole Earth Software Catalog, merged his countercultural networks with the world of personal computer enthusiasts. This produced the WELL (Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link), an extremely influential online conferencing system marked by its sense of community and wide-ranging discussions of politics, culture, and technology. It was the WELL that inspired Howard Rheingold to devise the concept of “virtual community.” Brand’s cohort spearheaded what Turner calls a reversal of the “political valance” of computers from remote, impersonal things used by agents of government and big business to intimate devices able to knit communities together and unleash personal potential. Brand’s personal networks extended ever further into the worlds of business and computing research. He formed an alliance with Nicholas Negroponte, founder of MIT’s influential Media Lab. Brand’s popular book Inventing the Future celebrated the lab’s potential to reconnect individuals and rebuilt communities via computer systems. Brand founded another business, the Global Business Network, to bring executives to a series of seminars and retreats. In 1990 Brand helped charter the Electronic Frontier Foundation to keep “cyberspace” free of government regulation.  Many of Brand’s associates became investors in, editors of, or contributors to Wired magazine. It was both a mascot and an early driver of the high-tech bubble of the 1990s. Embracing networks and computer technologies as both personally empowering and socially transformative, Wired promoted Brand’s friends (dubbed the “digerati”) as visionaries and advanced a libertarian political agenda.  Like Brand, Wired claimed descent from the counterculture of the 1960s while supporting Newt Gingrich whose idiosyncratic blueprint for a “Republican revolution” mixed social conservatism with a rhetoric of decentralization, entrepreneurship, and technological transformation. Turner writes clearly and concisely, organizing his sprawling story into a well crafted narrative around the twists and turns of Brand’s career. He nimbly summarizes the many relevant contexts and secondary literatures needed to address topics from the New Left to cybernetics to the founding of Wired magazine. He uses archival sources and access to the participants, including Brand’s personal diaries, to offer a seemingly authoritative telling of these stories. Some of these incidents are already familiar from journalistic accounts. Others are less well known. I was particularly interested in the explanation of exactly how “cyberspace” moved from its origins in the 1980s as a science fiction phrase to describe a deeply immersive virtual world to its vogue in the 1990s to describe text-based computer communication. The book’s primary value comes from integrating all these episodes into a single story. This exposes the surprising consistence of Brand’s philosophy and method of operation. For example, Turner discovers commonalities between the organization of the Whole Earth Catalog and the later WELL network. The Whole Earth Catalog, cast here as “an information technology,” included heated discussion from readers and projected itself as the focal point of an intellectually diverse community. Brand retained his quasi-mystical faith in utopian transformation and the power of technologies and ideas to empower individuals. He worked by making himself the focal point of a broad network, using the rhetoric of systems theory as what Turner, following Galison, calls a “contact language” for symbolic trading between disparate intellectual communities. We also see parallels between Brand’s own career and the vision he espoused of a world of skilled free agents growing rich through networks and the exchange of information. Turner resists the urge to editorialize but is unafraid to subject Brand to historical scrutiny, finding historical voices to note that his networks and communities were made up almost exclusively of young white men and that his ostensibly apolitical stance ignored the realities of social class. However it remains unclear whether Turner believes that the language of systems and cybernetics Brand and his counterparts appropriated represented a substantive transfer of concepts and methods from the Cold War elite or just a fashionable vocabulary on which to draw. This book makes an important contribution to historicizing the controversies of the 1960s and 1970s and demonstrating to historians the centrality of insights from the history of science and technology in studying the cultural history of these turbulent decades. From: members-bounces@sigcis.org [mailto:members-bounces@sigcis.org] On Behalf Of julie hugsted Sent: Wednesday, May 12, 2010 8:06 AM To: members@sigcis.org Subject: [SIGCIS-Members] Fwd: H-Net Review Publication: 'The Evolution of Punched-Card Systems' Hello, For those of you that are not on the H-SCI-MED-TECH mailing list and have not seen this announcement, it might have interest Best Julie