Seeing the return of 1960s words: "virtual community" "personal computer" "virtual frontier" - what can we learn from the geodesic dome and the Whole Earth Catalog
what was the counterculture and why does it matter now?
- image: Berkeley Free Speech Movement activists wearing Hollerith cards with the words strike
- not wanting to be "part of the machine"
- not wanting to be coded, put on cards
- what disappears in that story?
- The counterculture wasn't anti-tech, it was anti-BIG-tech
- two wings of the counterculture
- 1) new left: politics in order to change gov't - doing politics to change politics; struggle
- 2) the new communalists: step away from gov't and build new communities around communication, leading to a new society; consciousness - founding communes
- new communalists: technocentric visions informing techno beliefs today
- both: anti-mass culture, anti-bureaucracy
- Ken Kesey invited to speak at Berkeley, and tells them not to march - to go home and live differently
- 6000 communes established; NYT estimates more than 10 million living communally
- Q: where is women's movement? 2nd wave kicks in during 1970s
- new communalists are quite conservative - new settlements replicate suburban order
- children of the 1950s caught between nuclear holocaust and consumer cornucopia
the dream of comprehensive design
- turned to Buckminister Fuller, a 1930s technocrat
- story of death of Fuller's daughter
- Fuller's comprehensive designer can resolve the two: "harvesting the potentials of the realm," redistributing them as necessary, "valving" them into everyday life
- worked at the edges of big organizations
- surveyed information and goods they produce
- tracked world system as a whole
- redistributed goods as necessary
- you save the world by saving yourself
- quote from Fuller's Ideas and Integrities, 1963
two exemplary designs: the dome and the catalog
- two designs to change the world that blossomed in the 1960s
- change the world by changing the consciousness of the people in it
- geodesic dome - military shelter during Cold War along defense early-warning line
- light, but stable in the wind
- Drop City circa 1965 - domes made from the tops of automobiles
- orienting towards shared consciousness
- design as site of governance that shapes minds to work together
- whole earth catalog mapped tools for transformation
- selling Norbert Wiener books to people trying to farm the desert ?!
- buckskin clothing?!
- what is the logic of all these choices together?: changing your life, changing the world
- this is the prototype of virtual community technology
- you could not order goods from the catalog - they listed things and places to get them
- they created categories through which people understood their activities, and which painted a picture of the back-to-the land movement
- a map of an emerging commune world - a map of sources, pointers
- legacy: the fusion of information-making and community-building
- making consciousness the basis of community - redistributing resources to creative elites
why the communes crumbled, and what that might teach us about the politics of
- by 1973 all but the most rigidly structured communes had disappeared
- why?
- design and communication were not sufficient
- when the money ran out, things got difficult
- gurus and factions emerged
- without explicit protocols, and with an emphasis on "likeness" and "cool"
- the cost in the desert got very high
"comprehensive design" in a different era
- power of info technology
- to prototype new social forms
- to enable individuals to take concerted action
- shift the locus of political action from the state to the community
- but also
- to enable the corporation above the state - ie, Paul Hawken
- strengthen the hands of those already endowed
- to make the distribution of resources harder to debate - when you base membership around cultural qualities, you privilege those qualities (ie, no people of color worked for whole earth catalog)
legacy of comprehensive design for computing today
- in their hype for technologically-enable communities of consciousness - we celebrate the communities that look like us, and not those who don't
- the legacy is beautiful, and risky - a terrible form of social narcissism to try to choose a way of life for everyone
Q: tensions btw new communities and new left?
A: lots of animosity - Gitlin vs Brand - there were some people in the computing world who tried to cross back and forth - like Lee Felsenstein
Q: imaginary Native American?
A: yes, lots of it. but an imagined idea of the nomadic self. But also note image of cowboy - kind of forerunner of the image of the free lancer. Note, though, that these nomads were well-funded, well-educated.
Q: was the tension really so extreme?
A: for those at the edges, for others there was some drifting.
Q: comment on Lev Manovich's work on movements in mass visual culture?
A: Bowker's essay on legitimacy exchange. large-scale information display projects (as in 1940s) have a knack of making it possible for designer and viewers to imagine themselves as masters of the world - pleasure of information domination - also take techniques of leading organizations for mapping - make them pleasurable and give the designers the legitimacy of those organization - nervous of embrace of artist-scientist because of that legitimacy exchange
Q: take on women's movement?
A: was tracing masculinist worlds - communes were also incredibly socially conservative (with the Cockettes as a notable example) - the women who were in those communes left them and formed alternatives
[what about Adrienne Rich?]
Q: bifurcated and "went stealth"
A: computer as carrier of meanings
Q: well, depends on what you study -- more women in ecology movement and communism - women and gay issues alive in 1960s, and intersecting with technologies - pamphlets, passing things out, cooking... you get farther if you include that stuff
feminist science fiction
Fuller - modernist 1930s technocrat - the idea of encasing
Q: Free and open source software?
A: legacies
- computer emphasis on identity and performance of self as a very 1960s phenomenon
- references to Giddens: now the self is the "pre-eminent brand"
- consumer electronics as a source of identity
- do groups have a language for discussing the distribution of resources? or do they hang together? is it an honest language? like picking up business cards at Burning Man
- celebrate the New Left's attention to the people as a whole, not to build bubble communities like Fuller - a world we can all live in
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