by
Fred Turner
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[...] Ever since the Soviet Union first tested an atomic bomb in 1949, Americans, and particularly young Americans, had suffered under a thick cloud of nuclear anxiety. For the college students of the early 1960s, that anxiety fused with fears for their own professional futures. Thanks to the power of postwar industry, they would have no trouble finding jobs. Yet many feared that to take those jobs would be to enter the bleak ranks of the bureaucracy that had brought forth nuclear weapons and, later, the Vietnam War. “There are models of marriage and adult life, but . . . they don’t work,” recalled the same young woman who had discovered the atomic bomb in the encyclopedia. “There is that whole conflict about being professional, leading a middle-class life which none of us have been able really to resolve. How do you be an adult in this world?”
In response to this question, and to the threat of technological bureaucracy more broadly, the youth of the 1960s developed two somewhat overlapping but ultimately distinct social movements. The first grew out of the struggles for civil rights in the Deep South and the Free Speech Movement and became known as the New Left. Its members registered formerly disenfranchised voters, formed new political parties, and led years of protests against the Vietnam War. The second bubbled up out of a wide variety of cold war – era cultural springs, including Beat poetry and fiction, Zen Buddhism, action painting, and, by the mid-1960s, encounters with psychedelic drugs. If the New Left turned outward, toward political action, this wing turned inward, toward questions of consciousness and interpersonal intimacy, and toward small-scale tools such as LSD or rock music as ways to enhance both. By the end of the decade, as youth everywhere adopted its drug habits and its sartorial styles, this branch of the youth movement, and ultimately youthful protestors as a whole, came to commonly be called “the counterculture.”
For this reason, I will call both those who actually established such communes and those who saw the transformation of consciousness as the basis for the reformation of American social structure New Communalists. In doing so, I hope to tease apart an important strand of countercultural thought and practice that has become so thoroughly entangled with the terms counterculture and New Left over the years as to have been rendered nearly invisible. By identifying the intellectual roots, the social ambitions, and the extensive historical influence of those who turned toward technology and mind as foundations of a new society, I also hope to clear up two historical misconceptions. Many historians today still read the youth movements of the 1960s as a generational rejection of the cold war world into which they were born. Among New Communalists, though, this was simply not the case: even as they set out for the rural frontier, 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. More recently, analysts of digital utopianism have dated the communitarian rhetoric surrounding the introduction of the Internet to what they have imagined to be a single, authentically revolutionary social movement that was somehow crushed or co-opted by the forces of capitalism.75 By confusing the New Left with the counterculture, and the New Communalists with both, contemporary theorists of digital media have often gone so far as to echo the utopians of the 1990s and to reimagine its peer-to-peer technologies as the rebirth in hardware and software of a single, “free” culture that once stood outside the mainstream and can do so again.
By turning to consciousness as a source of social change, Reich and the New Communalists who put his ideas into practice turned away from the political struggles that preoccupied both the New Left and the Democratic and Republican parties. But even as they did, they opened new doors to mainstream culture, and particularly to high-technology research culture. If the mind was the first site of social change, then information would have to become a key part of a countercultural politics. And if those politics rejected hierarchy, then the circles-within-circles of information and systems theory might somehow make sense not only as ideas about information, but also as evidence from the natural world for the rightness of collective polity. Finally, if the self was the ultimate driver of social change, and if class was no more, then individual lifestyle choices became political acts, and both consumption and lifestyle technologies — including information technologies —would have to take on a newly political valence.
And yet, in their own minds at least, the New Communalists were not simply colonizers. They may have bought up lands that formerly belonged to farmers and laborers, and they may have appropriated what they imagined to be working-class styles of manual labor and associated values of craft; but above all, they saw themselves as well-equipped refugees from technocracy. Drawing on the education, money, and technological savvy provided by the American mainstream and, less self-consciously, on its frontier mythology, they aimed to build communities that not only would serve as alternatives to a buttoned-down society, but would ultimately save that society from itself. If nuclear weapons and the Vietnam War, and perhaps even the urban riots that had plagued the last decade, were the products of a technocratic bureaucracy, then small-scale tools, the pursuit of higher consciousness, and the development of rural collaboratives might undermine the bureaucracy itself and, in the process, forecast a new, more harmonious future.
In the early 1970s, the Catalog came to model the potential integration of New Communalist ideals and information technology for researchers at Xerox PARC and for the leaders of the region’s emerging computer hobbyist culture. Founded in 1970 primarily to serve as a research laboratory for a recently acquired computer subsidiary, Xerox PARC substantially extended the trajectory of human-computer integration outlined by Bush and Licklider and pursued by Engelbart’s ARC group. Within ten years, researchers there had designed a computer for individual use (the Alto), an internal network with which to link these computers together (the first Ethernet), a graphical user interface, and the laser printer, among many other innovations. For the most part, these innovations grew out of a technical tradition associated with the ARPA community and with Engelbart’s ARC group. One of the very first hires at Xerox PARC was Robert Taylor, who had led ARPA’s Information Processing Techniques Office since 1966. Taylor in turn recruited Bill English and a dozen other members of Engelbart’s ARC group, hoping that they would bring their understanding of the NLS with them.18 Along with members of the ARC team, Taylor recruited a number of talented young programmers and engineers whom he had met in a series of graduate student symposia sponsored by ARPA. One of the most prominent of these was Alan Kay. In 1969 Kay’s PhD dissertation at the University of Utah had described an interactive desktop computer; as early as 1967, Kay had proposed a portable variation on that computer that he called the Dynabook. Kay’s Dynabook would soon provide a guiding vision for Xerox PARC’s pursuit of its own individualized computer, the Alto.
Levy argued that although they had not met, members of all three generations shared a single set of six values, a “hacker ethic”:
Access to computers — and anything which might teach you something about the way the world works — should be unlimited and total. Always yield to the Hands-On Imperative! . . .
All information should be free. . . .
Mistrust Authority —Promote Decentralization. . . .
Hackers should be judged by their hacking, not bogus criteria such as degrees, age, race, or position. . . .
You can create art and beauty on a computer. . . .
Computers can change your life for the better.
Yet, for all its forward-looking verve, Wired’s vision of the digital future also carried with it a particular version of the countercultural past. In its pages, desktop computers and the Internet became tools for personal and collective liberation in a distinctly Whole Earth vein. “The ’60s generation had a lot of power, but they didn’t have a lot of tools,” explained Jane Metcalfe, cofounder and president of Wired, as well as Rossetto’s wife. “And in many respects their protests were unable to implement long-term and radical change in our society. We do have the tools. The growth of the Internet and the growing political voice of the people on the Internet is proof of that.”3 In the pages of Wired, the Internet, and digital communication generally, stood as a prototype of a newly decentralized, nonhierarchical society linked by invisible bits in a single harmonious network. The builders of computers and telecommunications networks, suggested Wired— men like John Malone of TV cable behemoth TCI, Frank Biondi and Ed Horowitz of Viacom, and Bill Gates of Microsoft —were working to construct the high-tech infrastructure of a new and better world. So too were libertarian pundits and politicians. In the logic of Wired, they were simply social, as opposed to technical, engineers. Like their brethren in Silicon Valley, conservative author and media analyst George Gilder, futurist Alvin Toffler, and Republican Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich were working to bring about individual liberation and government by contract and code. Together, Wired seemed to suggest, these two communities had set about to free America and the world from the rigid, oppressive corporate and government bureaucracies of the twentieth century.
In 1998 Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron named Wired’s particular blend of libertarian politics, countercultural aesthetics, and techno-utopian visions the “Californian Ideology.” As they pointed out, by the end of the decade, its tenets had become the day-to-day orthodoxy of technologists in Silicon Valley and beyond. But this ubiquitous set of beliefs did not in fact grow out of the legacy of the New Left, as Barbrook and Cameron suggested. Rather, a close look at Wired’s first and most influential five years suggests that the magazine’s vision of the digital horizon emerged in large part from its intellectual and interpersonal affiliations with Kevin Kelly and the Whole Earth network and, through them, from the New Communalist embrace of the politics of consciousness.4
Something peculiar about working in Amazon is the strange language you have to pick up, which can be bewildering at first. I’ve already mentioned that warehouses are now ‘Fulfillment Centres’ and ‘Problem Solvers’ work on ‘Cows’. Well, workers are not called ‘staff’ or even ‘employees’ here. We are all called ‘associates.’ Whether we’re workers or bosses, we’re all supposed to be the same, and our relationship with the corporation is made to feel all cuddly, though really it’s just made more distant. The workers are aware of the implications of this. One staff member talked to me about a ‘propaganda video’ (their wording) Amazon uses to teach their management how to identify and prevent union organising among their ‘associates’. This can be found on YouTube for a taste of how these people talk.1
lol
There are two different kinds of workers, those of us who are employed by Amazon, called ‘blue badges’, and those who work for an agency, who are called ‘green badges’. We have to wear these coloured badges with our personal details on lanyards all day, so we’re easily identifiable. Those of us who work for an agency and have been brought in during the pandemic to help meet increased demand are designated as ‘heroes’. This reminds me of how the government is calling NHS workers heroes for being so brave working against the coronavirus without adequate PPE. At Amazon, it’s another strange use of language that they take even further, as each agency staff member is literally given a badge with a Superhero on it (e.g. Hyperion, Drax The Destroyer, and so on - I’m not good with superhero names). They are then told to check the Heroes Board every morning to see which section of the building they have been assigned to work at for the day. We generally work in a different place every day, so we never really get to know anyone, which makes organising very difficult. I find calling workers ‘superheroes’ incredibly patronising, although my co-workers find it more funny than anything else.
Ah, the rules. They are rarely fully explained to you, you just find out about them whenever you’re either caught breaking them, or a co-worker explains them to you to try to keep you out of trouble. For instance, there are a set of rules about the speed of your work. For stowers, you must stow at least 1 item every three, four, five minutes (the precise time changes regularly), or you will be logged as ‘idling’ and are liable to have your pay docked for ‘idle time’. You must also meet a quota of items stowed. I’m told that there’s a room somewhere in the building where someone is constantly monitoring everyone’s work speed, and can send someone out to find us if they notice someone is idling a lot. At the moment, I’m told you must stow an equivalent of 35 large items or 178 small items per hour, or you will be classed as idling unless you can give a valid excuse. Running out of work due to delays earlier in the process is a valid excuse. Going to the toilet is not. We do get told that we’re allowed to have toilet breaks, which is technically correct (the best kind of correct), but in reality there’s no way you can get to the toilet and back in time to prevent being flashed as idling - unless you’re lucky enough to be working right next to one. By my count there are 4 different toilet facilities open to workers located around the 700,000 square feet building, all on the ground floor, so good luck with that one.