Imaginary Gadgets = Whole Earth Catalog?

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From Bruce Sterling's undoubtedly endlessly linked initial blog entry for his Imaginary Gadgets Project:

You are likely getting useful, provocative insights from people who were never your colleagues in the past. These are people with thought-processes somewhat orthogonal to your own, who nevertheless show up repeatedly on your search engines as you perform your own work. For instance, go look at my 100+ Twitter contacts -- "bruces." How many of those people are "science fiction writers" or even "writers" of any kind? Many of these characters have careers that can't be described in less than a paragraph.

I think this situation is a fact-on-the-ground for a densely-networked, digitized society. I also think the pace of this phenomenon is accelerating. I don't believe we will get a choice about it. If it's inevitable, then we should exploit the inevitability.

Now, my larger suspicion here -- let's call it a hypothesis -- is that there is some grand unified theory for speculative cultural activity. In other worlds, "speculative culture" is not a crazy-quilt, it is a nexus. Every creative discipline has methods to shake up its preconceptions and think inventively. I want to catalog, compare and contrast those methods. I surmise that they have some inner unity, a consilience. If there's no such thing, then that's a useful discovery, too.

Since I am a writer, the first deliverable for this project is a book, the book to be called "User's Guide to Imaginary Gadgets." Composing a book is my own way to test the waters: to create a work that would be a typical "Speculative Culture" book. The very act of writing books creates culture. So, perhaps we'll do some useful work here.

I'm reading From Counterculture to Cyberculture, and maybe I'm on crack, but this seems so reminiscent of what the Whole Earth Catalog ended up doing for a very different set of groups in the 1960's:

In this way, the Catalog provided a framework within which engineers and hobbyists could link their own desires for both certain forms of information processing and countercultural legitimacy to the shifting capacities of new computing machines. The Catalog offered new ways to imagine the possibilities of computers and also legitimated the use of computers in nontraditional settings such as classrooms and public storefronts by linking those uses to a New Communalist ethos. This was particularly true for people seeking to use time-sharing computers for peer-to-peer public computing. Lee Felsenstein, for example, was a former computer engineer, a participant in the Free Speech Movement, and an antiwar activist. He had written for the underground newspaper the Berkeley Barb, and he would go on to help found the Homebrew Computer Club. Felsenstein remembers the Whole Earth Catalog as a sort of Bible of countercultural technology. At that time, he explains, technology was a "secular religion" in mainstream America; with the Catalog, in contrast, Stewart Brand "set up an alternate temple of the same religion, of the church of technology, telling people in technological society that people needed to learn to use tools." For those who, like Felsenstein, were both trained engineers and participants in the youth movements of the 1960s, this new religion offered a way forward. In Felsenstein's words, the Whole Earth Catalog reminded its readers that "you don't have to leave industrial society, but you don't have to accept it the way it is."

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This page contains a single entry by Liz published on March 6, 2009 8:47 AM.

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