by
Fred Turner
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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
With Lucien and boys like him—who will forever remain mere boys—there is no war nor suffering nor valor. There is only some bland girl, some banal pop song, a romantic comedy, an August vacation.
harsh but like yeah
Charisma does not originate inside the person called “charismatic.” It comes from the need of others to believe that special people exist.
Without having met him, I was certain that Pascal Balmy’s charisma, like anyone’s—Joan of Arc’s, let’s say—resided only in the will of other people to believe. Charismatic people understand this will-to-believe best of all. They exploit it. That is their so-called charisma.
I care about fine wine but not about food, and because the terrine is efficient—comes in its own container and can be consumed unheated—I stole two jars of it from one of these travel centers, the weight of the jars giving a new tug to the leather straps of my handbag as I purchased my wine.
It wasn’t that I believed the wine I bought was payment enough for my jars of human cat food. Stealing is a way to stop time. Also, it refocuses the mind, the senses, if they become dulled, for instance by drinking. Stealing puts reality into sharper relief.
You’re in a highway travel center, people in a great flux and flow, coming and going and milling and choosing, the cashiers in a fugue state of next and next and next. And in order to locate the precise moment when you can take unseen, you slow it all down. You make time stop. You insert into reality what composers call a “fermata,” and while time is stopped, you put something in your bag.
In this way, I test my fitness. I test my ability to see. I gauge what other people see, and also, what they fail to see.
I peed in the wooded area beyond the open lot. While squatting, I encountered a pair of women’s Day-Glo-orange underpants snagged in the bushes at eye level.
This did not seem odd. Truck ruts and panties snagged on a bush: that’s “Europe.” The real Europe is not a posh café on the rue de Rivoli with gilded frescoes and little pots of famous hot chocolate, baby macaroons colored pale pink and mint green, children bratty from too much shopping and excited by the promise of the cookies, the ritual reward of a Saturday’s outing with their mother. That is a conception of Europe cherished by certain Parisians and as imaginary as the pastoral scenes in the frescoes on the walls of the posh café.
The real Europe is a borderless network of supply and transport. It is shrink-wrapped palettes of superpasteurized milk or powdered Nesquik or semiconductors. The real Europe is highways and nuclear power plants. It is windowless distribution warehouses, where unseen men, Polish, Moldovan, Macedonian, back up their empty trucks and load goods that they will move through a giant grid called “Europe,” a Texas-sized parcel of which is called “France.” These men will ignore weight regulations on their loads, and safety inspections on their brakes. They will text someone at home in their ethno-national language, listen to pop music in English, and get their needs met locally, in empty lots on mountain passes.