Fred Turner: The Politics of Design in the American Counterculture

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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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