“the wealth of networks is just as concentrated as financial wealth.”

Techno-utopianism has a history that extends beyond the widespread use of the personal computer. The champions of the PC itself have a past that extend into the 1960s counterculture. In this blog, I examine the relationship of the Whole Earth Network to the techno-utopianism of today.

The Whole Earth Network emerged not only out of 1960s counterculture, but also out of new modes of work and organization that emerged during and after WWII. These modes stressed collaboration, flexibility, and, at times, decentralization. “[M]embers of the Whole Earth network helped reverse the political valence of information and information technology and turn computes into emblems of countercultural revolution,” writes Turner. “At the same time, however, they legitimated a metamorphosis within – and a widespread diffusion of – the core cultural styles of military-industrial-academic technocracy that their generation had sought to undermine” (2006, p. 238). This network, which Turner refers to as the New Communalists,” began with “the bohemian artists of cold war Manhattan and San Francisco, and later the hippies of Haight-Ashbury and the youthful back-to-the-landers,” which later in the 1980s and 1990s became the pioneers of internet culture. Contrary to the New Left, the New Communalists “in fact embraced technocentric optimism, the information theories, and the collaborative work style of the research world” (p. 240).

The communications and transportation technologies of the industrial age created economic conditions that allowed “the mass-media model of information and cultural production and transmission” to dominate. Benkler today believes that “[t]he internet presents the possibility of a radical reversal of this long trend” (2006, p. 30). He attempts to demonstrate that the digitization of culture makes it possible for everyone to interact with its contents. A universally networked humanity may access the entire corpus of dematerialized culture and participate in its transmission, synthesis and a free interaction of subjects. Challenges and changes to copyright and other intellectual property laws, according to Benkler, will open up this free flow. This is the “world interlinked by invisible systems” that the Whole Earth Network imagined (Turner 2006, p. 244).

One must pay careful attention to these mentions of “possibilities.” Matthew Hindman challenges Benkler’s impressions of digital democracy, arguing that the internet does not represent a robust though virtual public sphere. In The Myth of Digital Democracy, through comprehensive methods, he demonstrated that “the mechanisms of exclusion may be different online, but […] they are no less effective” (2009, p. 12). So then the possibility envisioned by Benkler is not yet actuality. But Hindman argues that these shortfalls are a result of both cognitive reasons – people approach the internet with a utilitarian purpose and “simplify with a vengeance” (Mosca 2009, p. 1397) – and for structural reasons. “From its Domain Name Servers to its IP addresses,” Douglas Rushkoff argues, “the Internet depends on highly centralized mechanisms to send our packets from one place to another” (2011). Hindman reveals precisely how internet search engines and linking procedures work to centralize information and exclude the fringes from all but a miniscule group of users.

Rather than a commons, or a robust democracy, the wealth of networks is just as concentrated as financial wealth. It is a virtual Hedonism for the elite, and a finely functioning gateway for gatekeepers. The internet is to culture what bourgeois art was during the Renaissance. It offers transcendent withdrawal from the social for those who know the access points. This might be interesting for some, because those points do not necessarily exclude individuals and groups the way other structures in the existing society do. Financial wealth is not the only price to be paid, and its monetary costs may not be as high as other methods for inclusion in social life. But, access to a computer that is connected to the network is not the only and the mere costs of admission. The uses of the information, the means by which to access it, and the ability to translate it into something meaningful are not universally available. At least not yet.

While for the digital elite, “hierarchies have been replaced by flattened structures, long-term employment by short-term project-based contracting, and professional positions by complex, networked forms of sociability” (Turner 2006, p. 239), this is a reality for few others (except in the case that much of employment is now short-term yet without any of the autonomy of which the early techno-utopians dreamed). Certainly such spaces have been carved out, but this cyberculture remains a fringe. For that reason some, like Frank Webster (1995), question the assumption that we live in the purported “information society” at all. Benkler believes the “confluence of technical and economic changes is now altering the way we produce and exchange information, knowledge, and culture,” (p. 31) but is only a little more convinced than Webster about how deep these changes have altered economic life. “Technology creates feasibility spaces for social practice,” explains Benkler.

Some things become easier and cheaper, others harder and more expensive to do or to prevent under different technological conditions. The interaction between these technological-economic feasibility spaces, and the social responses to these changes – both in terms of institutional changes […] and in terms of changing social practices – define the qualities of a period. The way life is actually lived by people within a given set of interlocking technological, economic, institutional, and social practices is what makes a society attractive or unattractive, what renders its practices laudable or lamentable. (2006, p. 31).

Vincent Mosca, in reviewing The Myth of Digital Democracy, argued that “we are near the end of irrational exuberance about the internet’s potential to realize everything from the death of time and space to the death of death itself.” As a result of “decade of technological and economic crashes” these old “utopian visions have lost their sublime appeal” (2009, p. 1394). Maybe the utopianism is waning, but exuberance abounds.

This glee does not go unchallenged. In the Summer 2010 issue of Adbusters, featuring a cover emblazoned as the “Whole Brain Catalog” confronted the techno-utopianism of the Whole Earth Catalog head-on. Where the latter emphasized an eradication of pollution and focused on biotoxins, toxic environments, biodiversity and ecological collapse, Adbusters called for “the birth of a movement” to challenge noise, infotoxins, toxic culture, infodiversity and mental breakdown.  The editors wrote that “the mental environment has become the terrain where our fate as humans will be decided.” Rather than seeing nearly unbound potential, they fear we are “running out of culture” and quote Jaron Lanier, who wrote that “we face a situation in which culture is effectively eating its own seed stock” (Lasn & White 2010, pages unnumbered). In closing, they express the concern:

Financial, ecological and ethical collapse loom on the horizon even as the rate of mental illness continues to climb. The world has literally gone mad. But as more people trace their anxieties, mood disorders and depressions back to the toxins in our mental world, the first murmurs of insurrection can be faintly heard.  (Lasn & White, pages unnumbered)

The question that remains for me is whether the pollution of the mental environment and the shift to spastic, depersonalized, disembodied communication as the norm disables the movement that is supposedly being born from learning to walk. Just as a body, riddled with cancer, has little opportunity to thrive and survive, a movement made up of toxic personalities inhabiting a virtual and ecological wasteland seems to have few prospects.

Works cited:

Benkler, Y. (2006) The Wealth of Networks. Yale.

Hindman, M. (2009) The Myth of Digital Democracy. Princeton.

Lasn, K. and M. White. (2010) “Ecology of the mind: the birth of a movement.” Adbusters, Summer 2010.

Mosca, V. (2009) “Approaching digital democracy.” New Media & Society 11(8), pp. 1394-1400.

Rushkoff, D. (2011) “Abandon the corporate internet.” Shareable. January 3, 2011. Accessed 10/30/11 at http://shareable.net/blog/the-next-net

Webster, F. (1995) Theories of the Information Society. Routledge.

Turner, F. (2006) From Counterculture to Cyberculture. Chicago.