å November 2015

Stewart Brand from a young age was fearful of living in a hyperrationalized world and becoming a cold war inspired drone, an unthinking cog in the machine of a society that would not allow him to be an individual. His own experiences in collegiate life, then the military, left him dissatisfied with bureaucratic structures in which individualism was not encouraged, though through those life experiences at Stanford, as a draftee in the army, and later exploring the art scenes of New York and San Francisco inspired promotion of cross-genre social collaboration and communal experiences. Brands ideas that were formed by these experiences were in many ways supported by Buckminster Fuller’s comprehensive designer model as Brand’s own ideal for an individualistic society.

Brand adopted the ideas that societal evolution was dependant on each person as an individual in order to contribute and influence as a mass population. In addition to reading about such biological social structures, Brand read Buckminster Fuller’s ideas that offered Brand a worldview in which the technology and information developed in military and industrial society could be embraced in a way to avoid the annihilation of our species, rather than race toward it. Fuller believed that those technologies could and should be used for the benefit of society rather than for its end. Furthermore, Fuller explained that one did not have to turn away from the current media technologies developed by “adult society” to show disapproval of bureaucratic society, rather they could still be enjoyed and ultimately used in ways to transform society and build new communities. Fuller’s vision of a “comprehensive designer,” an outsider who objectively observes, interprets and applies information from various sources for the ultimate benefit of society, a person who, like a computer can process information, was inspired by military research culture that utilized intellectual social networking. This greatly inspired Brand and is reflected in his involvement with the USCO and the New Communalists, the ultimate goals were to utilize technology to connect information -connect people- and continue to find new ways to improve society in a way in which hierarchy and politics are irrelevant.

This weeks reading was rather interesting, after having gotten the understanding from last week’s class discussion.  That insight helped me to grasp the concept relating to Brand & Fuller.  The idea of the comprehensive designer by Fuller, represents the idea of the symbiotic relationship of technology and the human capacity for creativity.  Fuller describes the “Comprehensive Designer” as people with the technological knowledge to utilize the various products of science, technology, big business, etc – but, who is not a total adherent to just one discipline, but rather someone with the ability to see, understand and imagine new and beneficial ways of translating these concepts into useful applications for the benefit of humanity in diverse ways.

For Brand, a proponent of the New Communal Movement of the 60’s counterculture, which was evidenced by his involvement with the USCO, Fuller’s concept of the “Comprehensive Designer” helped shape his work, tempered by his group’s creative and technical knowledge.  Brand was whole-heartedly against growing up to be an adult stuck in mediocrity and becoming a mindless drown of the bureaucratic hierarchy.  The freedom and almost nomadic concept of the Comprehensive Designer, represented the all encompassing aspect of embracing technology and the products it produced, with the freedom to bend and shape these tools to creating useful and beneficial expressions for humanity.  This meant that, he was free to collaborate with people of diverse knowledge and backgrounds, to achieve new ways to implement and utilize everything that was available.  Looking at these products and concepts from new and different viewpoints, could/would allow for visionaries to collaborate and imagine/design advances yet thought of; and, ultimately to share these new and innovative advances for the betterment of humanity.

To Brand, whose idealized vision of human society was a harmonious, nonhierarchical world – the idea of interdisciplinary collaboration would have seemed a natural fit to his world and way of thinking.  The abilities to process vast amounts of information, while being removed enough to see/imagine ways in which this technological information and industrial/military tools can be used, amazing benefits and ground breaking advances can be achieved.  Brand was captivated by and looked to the Native American Indians as his ideal for the “authentic and alternative community.  Brand’s ultimate goal was a de-institutionalized freedom from the constraints of government and to create a way of living that encompassed the totality of knowledge towards a “cosmic consciousness” equally and freely shared by the communal whole.

In the chapter “The shifting Politics of the Computational Metaphor” Fred Turner writes that “For both the New Left and the New Communalists, technological bureaucracy threatened a drab, psychologically distressing adulthood at a minimum and, beyond that, perhaps even the extinction of the human race. For the New Left, movement politics offered a way to tear down that bureaucracy and simultaneously to experience the intimacy of shared commitment and the possibility of an emotionally committed adulthood. For the New Communalists, in contrast, and for much of the broader counter-culture, cybernetics and systems theory offered an ideological alternative.” The New Left and The New Communalists are two different social movements but at the same time they have something in common. The New Left movement is a political movement. How I understood they was trying to change government. The New Left activists were against the war and thinking that they can use politics as the foundation. The New Communalists movement was trying to make their own society, the idea to make a society were they would leave. They were not that political, they turned away from politics and didn’t trust politicians. The New Communalist considers more peaceful. They believed that the main reason to changes is their mind.

Due by midnight Tuesday, November 17th (350-400 words).

Turner (2006:56) references Buckminster’s Fuller’s idea of the “Comprehensive Designer,” described in Fuller’s book Ideas and Integrities (1963). As Turner (2006:56) explains, “[a]ccording to Fuller, the Comprehensive Designer would not be another specialist, but would instead stand outside the halls of industry and science, processing the information they produced, observing the technologies they developed, and translating both into tools for human happiness.” Elaborating on the idea of the comprehensive designer, describe the vision of the world espoused by Fuller. Why do you think this vision was so appealing to Stewart Brand? If you are unsure, take a guess.

Fred Turner does a great deal to disambiguate the often monolithic idea of “the counterculture” we’re presented with in latter day retellings of the 1960s. He draws sharp distinctions, in particular, between the political movement that was the New Left and the lifestyle movement that characterized the New Communalists. Where the New Left believed that organizing political parties, staging direct actions and creating an alternative political structure as a means of achieving social democracy, for the New Communalists, institutionalism was itself inherently flawed and the goal was not so much to subvert it as to opt out of it altogether. The New Left largely emerged as a bloc of white college educated students who borrowed from philosophical and political critiques of capitalism to frame a critique of the encroaching blend of military and industry. They decried the blend of man and machine as ultimately destructive and likely to bring about rationalist subjugation if not total annihilation. New Communalists, conversely, were less dismayed by the blend of military and industry per se than they were by the notion of hierarchical structures in general. They blended esoteric philosophies with a form of libertarianism that sought a society that was generally flatter and more internally focused. The inward journey toward an elevation of consciousness as the principals means of liberation from society as it was naturally dovetailed with the early promises of cyberneticists, who theorized that the merger of man and tool, or, more specifically, man and machine, could upend social relationships and alter our understanding of what it meant to be human. The systems theory that resulted out of the interdisciplinary atmosphere from which the cyberneticists hailed easily appealed to the New Communalists, according to Turner. Systems theory’s lionization of non-bureaucratic interrelations coincided neatly with the New Communalists ideas of autonomous networked communities working outside the mainstream. Turner argues that neither the New Left nor the New Communalists were operating outside the mainstream in any authentic way and neither were subverted by capitalism as much as simply as simply an outgrowth of it. This aligns with several of the Scholz readings, most notably Terranova, who argues that both digital culture and economy are deeply linked to capitalism and not operating outside as a new social order, having descended from the miraculous digital ether. The New Communalists as cultural antecedents to the modern internet certainly explains a lot of the modern optimism within the industry and even the emergence of the notion of Technological Singularity in the popular consciousness (an idea, perhaps not coincidentally, reported on at length in the Whole Earth Review and written about extensively by both Stewart Brand and Kevin Kelly).

Most of my understanding of Communalism comes from Murray Bookchin and seems somewhat different from the New Communalist movement Turner is here describing as Bookchin’s version is a clear outgrowth of the politics of the New Left. As such, I’m left to wonder if he may be making the same error of generalization about communalism that he criticizes historians for making when conflating the counterculture as an amorphous mass.

Angeline Henriquez

Digital Media and Society

November 10, 2015

The New Left and the New Communalists

In the chapter titled “The shifting Politics of the Computational Metaphor” Turner explores how branches within countercultures have differing relationships to information technologies. More specifically, he explains how the emergence of the New Left and the New Communalists has its roots in the war and post-war environment of the 1950s and 1960s where free speech movements started proposing the idea that the knowledge taking place in universities was inherently entangled with the military-industrial complex. In this way, free speech movement supporters were concerned that knowledge and information were being fragmented to fit the necessities of the political environment of the time and that students were then being deems as part of the machine. Turner writes “the university generated new knowledge and new workers for an emerging ‘information society’. In that sense…the university was an information machine.” (p. 12). This implied then, that university was underpinned by a hierarchy system, and the students opposed to being used as parts to a machine or bits of information. They refused to be compared to the two-dimensional dullness of an IBM card. “The transformation of the self into data on an IBM card marked the height of dehumanization.” (p.16)

However, Tuner alludes that there was an openness in this seemingly closed world that has been forgotten by historians. He highlights that the war environment provided a platform for new technologies to be produced, and allowed for multiple disciplines in universities to work together in a system of collaboration rather than in a hierarchy system. “The laboratories within which the research and development too place witnessed a flourishing of nonhierarchical, interdisciplinary collaboration.” (p. 18). This environment of collaboration seemed to be obscured when it resulted in the production of the atomic bomb, exposing to many, that decisions made in in the higher tiers of the hierarchy affected the everyday lives of individuals. “Some men come to occupy positions in American society from which they can look down upon… and by their decisions mightily affect, the everyday worlds of ordinary men and women” (p.29) From here stemmed the ideologies that forged the New Left. Having understood that a new kind of social structure would have to take place, the New Left “took activism to be the fundamental mission of the movement” (p. 35), Turner’s argument is that they did so while still using the traditional political tactics. New Communalists however, while also pushing for a new kind of social structure considered that “political activism was at best beside the point and at worst part of the problem.” (p.35). The New Communalists considered a change of consciousness as the answer to significant social change and if they were to focus on changing the mind first, it was logical to them that this cannot be separated from information. “Information would have to become a key part of countercultural politics.” (p.38) viewing cybernetics and systems theory as a viable alternative to overthrow hierarchies and promote a system of collaboration through which the flow of information could reach and change consciousness.

In “The Shifting Politics of the Computational Metaphor” chapter, Fred Turner explained how the New Left and the New Communalists are two different social movements but have some common characteristics. According to Turner, the New Left was primarily formed as a political movement “out of the struggles for civil rights in the Deep South and the Free Speech Movement” (p. 31). Members form political parties and protested against the Vietnam War, “industrial activities, and bureaucratic organization of the universities” (p. 34).

Similar to the New Left movement, the New Communalists also sought to challenge the bureaucracy and the cold war social order. However, unlike the New Left, they did not see politics as the solution to this. The mind was their alternative to politics. They turned away from politics as a solution for social change.

Turner also added that:
“For the New Left, movement politics offered a way to tear down that bureaucracy and simultaneously to experience the intimacy of shared commitment and the possibility of an emotionally committed adulthood. For the New Communalists, in contrast, and for much of the broader counter-culture, cybernetics and systems theory offered an ideological alternative. Like Norbert Wiener two decades earlier, many in the counterculture saw in cybernetics a vision of a world built not around vertical hierarchies and top-down flows of power, but around looping circuits of energy and information. These circuits presented the possibility of a stable social order based not on the psychologically distressing chains of command that characterized military and corporate life, but on the ebb and flow of communication” (p. 38).

My understanding of this is that the New Left wanted to get rid of the bureaucracy and hierarchy of power, and the way the saw this was possible was through political activism. The New Communalists, on the other hand, believed not only in the mind and the transformation of consciousness as sources of the social order reform, but also in cybernetics.

Marisa Chung
11/10/15
Hybrid Assignment 9

In chapter one, Turner distinguishes the New Left from the New Communalists through the affinities of latter by a cybernetic vision of the world by looking at the two opposite perspectives and how it will shape our society.

From my understanding of this chapter, the New Left activists represented as being against war, as it takes the view from the Free Speech Movement of the 1960s, yet wanted to change the politics. They believed that the key was to use politics as their source. In contrast, New Communalists, wanted to avoid party politics, bureaucracy, as well as other organized social worlds. Their motive was to build a new community which did not focus on politics, it was the mind. They believed that if people shared the same ideas as others, then politics altogether would not be needed because they will be unified as one group. Power did not belong to anyone; it belonged to all, by building a community. In addition, technology was now used as a tool and taken advantage of due to the convenience to become part of a society, which the New Left activists would not have agreed on.