Netting out

 
PAUL DUGUID
Fred Turner
FROM COUNTERCULTURE TO CYBERCULTURE
Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism
360pp. University of Chicago Press. $29.
0 226 81741 5

History may be the prerogative of the victors, but it is written by writers. Hence From Counterculture to Cyberculture, Fred Turner’s account of the changing image of the computer, is less concerned with the engineers and programmers who built computers, or the people who used them, and more concerned with the ideologues who wrote about them. Turner convincingly portrays a cadre of journalists who strove to transform the idea of the computer from a threat during the Cold War into a means of achieving personal freedom in an emerging digital utopia. Both these extreme views are one part technological determinism, and – unsurprisingly in the land of the technological sublime – one part religion. Each abandons nuance and subtlety in order to persuade us that if we follow the technology we will go “direct to heaven”, or are “all going direct the other way”.

At the heart of the utopian mission stands Stewart Brand, whose surname reflects his considerable marketing talents. Brand famously coined the aphorism “information wants to be free”. (He hedged this exposed position by immediately adding that it also wants to be expensive.) Throughout his career, he has shown an eye for a phrase to tantalize the susceptible with intimations of profundity. “We are as gods”, he proclaimed at the opening of each issue of his Whole Earth Catalog, which appeared from 1968 to 1971, “and might as well get good at it.” (This sort of sub-Nietzschean language, which has filtered down from novelists such as Ayn Rand, entranced the countercultural writers of the day, including Brand’s fellow Rolling Stone journalist Hunter S. Thompson.) In the Catalog, Brand created a sort of hippie bible, though astutely he never took it, or its progeny, too far from their Sears’ roots. He followed his success with a couple of lower-profile and less profitable periodicals (CoEvolution Quarterly and Signal), before rising to prominence again in the pages of Wired, the propaganda organ of the digital age. Here Brand’s unclear role but undoubted influence vindicated the sinewy networks he had assiduously built which Turner diligently maps. Brand also helped found the WELL (the Whole Earth ’Lectronic Link), an early cluster of computer chatrooms whose unexceptional online gossiping was elevated to a higher plane when Howard Rheingold, another ideologue of the digerati, anointed it a “virtual community” where people could “homestead on the electronic frontier”.

As a young man, Brand hung around Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters. That he missed Kesey’s legendary bus is indicative of his often liminal role. Nonetheless, he turns up at significant moments in post-war American countercultural history with the regularity of Woody Allen’s Zelig. He dropped acid with Timothy Leary, hung out with Buckminster Fuller and Marshall McLuhan, walked the fringes of the 1960s New York art scene, filmed the first “be-in”, and got to San Francisco in time to catch Beats turning into Hippies. He also cultivated California’s geeks, Turner shows, absorbing Norbert Weiner’s theory of “cybernetics” and getting to know Douglas Engelbart and Alan Kay, pioneer computer scientists whose considerable triumphs in personal computing Brand duly embellished. There he was again at the 1984 “Hacker’s Conference” in Marin County, the nerd’s equivalent of the first “be-in” or, as one hacker described it, “the Woodstock of the computer elite”. Moving between these different worlds, though never clearly belonging to any, Brand (who in a 1972 article in Rolling Stone introduced readers to the Net, which at that time was a little-known experiment under the control of the Advanced Research Projects Agency of the Department of Defense and known as the ARPA-Net), gave cultural respectability to the emerging world of computers, helping, in Turner’s words, “to create the cultural conditions under which microcomputers and computer networks could be imagined as tools of liberation”, and to portray “technological production and research as hip”.

Brand is quite rightly at the centre of this account of the domestication of the computer. Thanks to him, today’s office accessory was able to shed its association with military research and develop a mystique whereby, as we thrash out ever more tedious spreadsheets, we nevertheless can feel at one with the awful fascinations of cyberspace. But Brand was unusual only in the relative level-headedness of his judgements. Beyond him, Turner draws a group of self-proclaimed spokesmen of the age who had more facile ways of making hype seem profound and presenting the mundane and self-serving as alluring and emancipatory. Among these is John Perry Barlow, a former campaign manager for Dick Cheney, a man of multiple religious convictions but steadfast evangelical zeal. Barlow encapsulated the ability of such cyberrevolutionaries to rise above contradiction by churning out a bombastic “Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace” while attending the World Economic Forum in Davos. Several of these ideologues have Republican links – among them Lou Rossetto, the former chair of Columbia University’s Young Republicans and a co-founder of Wired. They also share an evangelical zeal and revolutionary rhetoric. George Gilder, a former Nixon speechwriter, claimed messianic powers of prophecy in his Telecosm: How infinite bandwidth will revolutionize our world (2000). His visions lured hundreds of investors to lose millions with the collapse of the fibre optic bubble during the stock-market crash of 2000. (Gilder’s main regret seems to have been that the losers could no longer afford to subscribe to his lucrative newsletter.) There are few women in this world (Gilder boasted of his election as Male Chauvinist Pig of the Year by the National Organization of Women), where not only sexism but other troubling prejudices lurk behind the layers of rhetorical varnish. Esther Dyson, a former financial journalist, seems to have survived by making relentless girlishness inseparable from ruthless networking. Dyson, with Gilder, the futurist Alvin Toffler, and Ronald Reagan’s science adviser George Keyworth (we must assume he advised against), wrote a “Magna Carta for the Digital Age”, attempting to trump Barlow’s “Declaration”. As one reader pointed out, its argument that digital technologies would enhance individual freedom made its case by equating such freedom with corporate deregulation.

If Brand was the impresario, his protégé Kevin Kelly was the ringmaster. A born-again Christian, Kelly had been a staff member of both the CoEvolution Quarterly and Signal before his translation to executive editorship of Wired. Matching Barlow’s thoughts about discovering “the underlying grammar of nature” with his own about a “new era in human evolution”, Kelly encouraged the magazine to trawl depths of digital superficiality. One of several at this time to reduce the complexity of society to utilitarian self-interest by ingesting the tenets of “information economics” raw, he wrote a creed for the “New Economy”. He also barked the reputations of figures like Alvin Toffler, the politician Newt Gingrich, and the MIT academic Nicholas Negroponte, while cycling the words of his ideologue cohort through the pages of Wired. This feedback loop transformed their urgings into a higher- and higher-pitched scream until, in a hubristic moment that gives one faith in markets, Wired, the cheerleader of dotcom stock jobbing, failed twice to sell itself to otherwise voracious investors.

Though this cast would tax the powers of Dickens, Turner, a journalist turned academic, reveals many of the skills and few of the failings of his professions in telling this important story. It may be a result of his training in journalism, his obligation to his sources, or simply a taste for reticence, that his own thoughts on the carnival passing before our eyes are often muted. Indeed, on occasion it is not clear whether a juxtaposition of key facts indicates tactful judgement or mere coincidence, so restrained is his hand. Whichever it is, it is enjoyable and apt to find that a single page which opens with Brand claiming “I had no idea about the future” ends with him publishing a book called Media Lab: Inventing the future at MIT.

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Paul Duguid is Visiting Professor at the School of Information and Management Systems at the University of California, Berkeley. His book The Social Life of Information appeared in 2000.