Hybrid Assignment #9 – Jessie Salfen

Fred Turner makes clear that though they are often confused and melded together, there are distinct differences between the counterculture, the New Left and the New Communalists, though all three wanted societal change. The counterculture was actually made of people with non-political, consciousness-altering, hedonistic, and introspective ideals. Those of the New Left were outwardly politically motivated Free Speech and Civil Rights activists who wanted to move away from the nuclear and militaristic technologies developed for WWII and the cold war. The New Communalists, named after the thousands of communes they formed between 1965 and 1972, removed themselves from mainstream society to form their own egalitarian societies and connect with one another by use of cold war era technology.

The activists of the New Left were motivated by their rejection of the cold war politics in which they were raised. They feared being part of the current government led bureaucratized society that created computer and nuclear technology through the joining together of military, industry, and academia – three areas that had always operated singularly prior to WWII yet continued to work together on military projects after WWII and into the cold war. But it was the developments that occurred on the path to creating the technology that was embraced by the New Communalists. For military research and civilian research to collaborate it meant that scientists not only had to cross into fields outside of their specialties, they also had to work together with different types of sciences toward common goals. They created never used before forms of networking, created new methods in academic and scientific language to communicate, and established social orders which inspired new ways of organizing information that was greatly shared and used outside of those specific military projects by other institutions and research laboratories. Though it was thought that government involvement would create a top-down social structure, in reality nonhierarchical social management occurred to establish realms of scientific collaboration of cybernetics and systems theory.

The New Communalists embraced these new ideas in collaboration and sharing inforation but rejected industrial-era technocratic bureaucracy. They pushed for social change not through politics like the New Left but through organized ways of thinking and networking, collaborating knowledge and information from one another in effort to reclaim the humanity in society.

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