å Wednesday, December 9th, 2015

I remember seeing the Wired cover with Newt Gingrich and being mostly confused by it at the time because the social conservatism of the so called Republican Revolution. I identified Wired at the time with Bay Area leftists, largely conflating Silicon Valley and its evangelists with the progressive countercultural heads of the 1960s due to its geography. Over the years, I became convinced I was incorrect and that in fact there must have been some sort of entrenched conservatism that led to the celebration of free market ideology. Turner makes the case fairly convincingly in Chapter 6 that my initial hunch was at least partially correct, though before reading this book, it was hard to understand how countercultural veterans morphed into modern day libertarians. Turner demonstrates how the anti-bureaucratic rhetoric being pushed by the New Communalists dovetailed perfectly with the message being pushed by Gingrich and his colleagues. While that Congress is largely remembered for impeaching Clinton and inaugurating a rash of socially conservative reforms (most notably to welfare), they also picked up on the ideology of Reagan and Milton Friedman, pushing an agenda of nimbler, leaner deregulated America that followed the dictates of the free market. While Turner posits that the former New Communalists developed relationships with people like Gingrich due to an ideological kinship fomented by “market populism” it seems to me slightly more plausible that these alliances were just as likely to be materially motivated. In the burgeoning entrepreneurial model that was coming to comprise Silicon Valley, there was a need for startup capital that would lift many of the fledgling companies out of garages and into access to the financial markets that would allow them to grow into the mega-corporations many of them are today. For Turner, the notion of free consciousness, so ballyhooed by the New Communalists, gave way to the belief in the internet as the medium for realizing free, interconnected consciousness. This seemed to coincide neatly with the market populism being pushed by Gingrich and others who could themselves see the internet having adequately prepared the country to live out their fantasy of free economic exchange. It’s a compelling argument, but having read a little about how Silicon Valley grew into what it is today, the metaphor was indeed little more than a convenient rhetorical device to serve both the political actors and the V.C.s looking to grow their wealth unfettered by government interference. Later when Turner talks about how this unholy alliance led to the the Telecommunications Act, I think he’s on slightly firmer ground as it points to a very specific policy objective that benefited tech companies and points to the influence of a clear lobbying strategy.

Two questions:

When Turner describes the crafting of the Telecommunications Act as the magna carta of internet (de)regulation, he draws a parallel to Gingrich’s party’s Contract with America. (p. 231)

1. What would effective resistance to this legislation as it was conceived have looked like, i.e. what would have been characteristics of a magna carta that led to an internet more favorable to the kind of people’s platform Taylor and others envisioned.
2. Was the marriage of free market ethics and internet culture something that was more motivated by capitalistic reasons or true ideals seeking an elevation of societal consciousness?

In chapter 6, Turner reports, “In 1987 the networks and cybernetic thought style of the Learning Conferences became the basis of the Global Business Network (GBN)” (183). How did the Learning Conference model explore group learning as a way of networking? How did the countercultural social theory which contributed to the Learning Conferences evolve into the Global Business Network, a consulting firm with corporate clients?

In response to this week’s hybrid assignment question – I can’t say that I understand the relationship of the question to the subject matter enough to be able to form a response.  I have read this a few times trying to relate it to the question, but it has eluded me.  I am hoping to understand this relationship between the question and the reading through our class discussion, after which, I then may find it possible to answer & repost for this response.

Angeline Henriquez

Digital media and Society

December 8, 2015

Wired and New Right Politics

In the chapter titled “Wired”, Turner walks us through the events that lead to the convergence of new communication technologies and new right wing politics. He focuses on the role that “Wired” magazine had during its first five years, and its many influential contributors that promoted ideas of personal and collective liberation through the “computational metaphor”. Towards the end of the chapter, Turner uses Wired’s 1995 interview of then Republican Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich to illustrate the cusp of this convergence, and the influence that the use of interpersonal networks had in presenting the Internet as a political sphere.

During this interview between Dyson and Gengrich “they depicted the Internet as a model of an ideally decentralized and in many ways degovernmentalized society, and as a tool to which bring that society about” (p. 231). In this way, Dyson and Gengrich married countercultural ideas of leveling hierarchies with the social conservative ideas of the New Right, through the use of new communication systems. However, “for the New Communalists, transforming consciousness had meant stepping outside party politics” (p. 219), and so for New Right dogmatist to bridge these opposite definitions of counterculture, and to explain how one can be countercultural while heading to Washington at the same time, it took some building up to which was the role of Wired magazine for its first five years.

Turner explains that to bridge these ideas, Wired and its contributors engaged in a “cycle of mutual legitimation”. They made use of the interpersonal networks gained from “The Whole Earth” and the “WELL”, allowing stories “by and about members of the editor’s personal and professional networks” (p. 217). They used editorial techniques to legitimize politicians that were pro-deregulation and global market place, while these politicians then could legitimize new communication technologies as essential to the national interest. Through this cycle, both spheres attempted to prove that “their current work was an extension of the 1960s consciousness revolution” (p. 219).

The Newt Gengrich interview was in a way, the icing on the cake, legitimizing the intersections between the technological, the Whole Earth, and the political sphere. By entering the political sphere the tech community stood for the open market proposal, and this in turn, gave way to looking at digital technology as a “tool and symbol of business” (p. 232) and thus also entering the corporate sphere.

Part II

1. In chapter 6 Turner talks about the Learning Conferences put together by Brand and compares these to “the happenings of the New York art world or the communes that followed them” (p.181) while at the same time referring to Conferences as a metaphor for an ideal elite. Is this a contradicting idea or can the happenings of the New York art world and the communes be considered elite experiences as well?

2. Turner states that members of the GBN network had a “distinctly male and as journalist Joel Garreau put it with consummate tact, ‘Anglo-American cast’” (p. 189) with only 15 women and 3 non-Caucasian members. Upon members complaints Brand’s explanation was that “it was both a product and a productive feature of the network organizational form” (p. 189). What did Brand mean by this?

In chapter 7, Turner reports on the history of Wired magazine and the people who played a part in its evolution, beginning with its conception by Louis Rossetto and Jayne Metcalfe. Kevin Kelly, who had been a writer for the Whole Earth Catalog and the Well, was hired as the founding editor, bringing with him “the simultaneously cybernetic and New Communalist social vision of the Whole Earth publications and their networked style of editorial work.” (209) From the beginning, the New Communalist ideology was a large influence in the editorial content of Wired. Articles from Wired were discussed on the Well and members such as Stewart Brand, Howard Rheingold and John Perry Barlow wrote articles for the magazine. “Editorially, Wired made no pretense of pursuing balance in either its point of view or its sources.” (216)

Turner connects these early affiliations with the New Communalists to the Esther Dyson/ Newt Gingrich interview by way of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), the Global Business Network and the Media Lab. The EFF, founded to promote digital rights and preserve personal liberties, was linked in a 1994 Wired article to the Merry Pranksters when writer Joshua Quittner “suggested that their current work was an extension of the 1960s consciousness revolution, undertaken with grown-up sobriety.” (219) Turner argues that these groups were the prototypes for ways to organize a life in the emerging world. While bringing the ideals of the New Communalists, they also were fighting for telecommunications deregulation in which they shared common ground with New Right politicians such as Newt Gingrich. While Dyson did not share the same politics with Gingrich, in the 1995 article in Wired magazine, they seem to agree on some things. After what I had read about Dyson, I expected the interview to be more confrontational. But they shared a similar agenda in maintaining the Internet as a model of a decentralized society and a “new frontier” in which cyberspace belonged to the people and should not be censored by the government. In one section of the article they discuss the legality of encryption when it comes to terrorist threats and if it will or should be illegal for some groups to use encryption. It’s hard to believe they were having this conversation 20 years ago. In 1995, the article apparently was a big step in aligning the former counterculturalists, New Right conservatives and the computer industry.

In Chapter 6, Turner talks about the WorldView Meetings of the Global Business Network. Specifically on page 191 Turner describes the meetings:

“A close look at any one of these meetings suggests that they were served as important forums for the construction of both new networks and a new rhetoric of networks. They also offered participants a chance to imagine themselves as members of a mobile elite, able to glimpse in the natural and economic systems around them the invisible laws according to which all things functioned. In July 1993, for instance, ecologist Peter Warshall led a small number of GBN network members and clients on a multi-day rafting trip near Taos, New Mexico….”

Would you argue that elitism network was GBN’s only product? Could they have been as successful without it? What if they would have made effort to bring in other classes or races?

Turner states that “Wired magazine’s vision of the digital horizon emerged in part from its affiliations,” but as Turner more succinctly points out, the magazine’s founder and editor-in-chief Louis Rossetto himself boasted that Wired is not a magazine about technology, rather it is a magazine about people who are “the merger of computers, telecommunications and the media… transforming life at the cusp of the new millennium.” The magazine, much like the New Communalist movement, is the networking of information. In the case of Wired, the information is people. Wired’s “vision of the digital horizon” is nothing more than the people who, like Kevin Kelly, Esther Dyson, Stewart Brand, John Perry Barlow, and George Gilder, promote the evolution of digital networking and its uses through the growing use of computers as “entrepreneurial information workers.” These individuals, who claim themselves to be the technical elite in the pages of Wired that they write for and about themselves, legitimize their professional networks by endorsing one another’s ideas for improving the digital generation. It was customary of Wired to dismiss the idea of balanced reporting as it regularly published articles about its own staff writers and featured companies, like the Global Business Network, one of the magazine’s main investors.

An aspect of the New Communalist ideals that the promoters of the “New Economy” embraced was the turning away from politics. While the New Communalists of the 1960’s were non-political, in the 1990’s many of the technological elite identified not as non-political but rather as libertarian. What we learned from the 1995 interview between Esther Dyson and Newt Gingrich, is that the New Right embraced new technologies and the internet but purposely manipulated the contact language created with the techno-libertarians to misappropriate the New Communalist inspired non-hierarchical, non-government views and manipulate new internet laws to garner themselves (members of the New Right) more power through commercial growth, specifically through the telecommunications companies. In fact, these Republicans, through the creation of the “Magna Carta for the Knowledge Age”, claimed that little “necessary” hierarchies, and ultimately corporate deregulation were agreed upon ideas collaborated with representatives of the New Communalists, computer technologists and government representatives and that New Right politics were a countercultural revolution, to stop it would be to stop progress of technology and growth of America. Ultimately, the use of the networked professionals was manipulated and, to use the metaphor of people as computers, it can be said that the techno-liberals of Wired were hacked by the New Right.

Turner argues that a “close look at Wired’s first and most influential five years suggests that the magazine’s vision of the digital horizon emerged from affiliations with Kevin Kelly and the Whole Earth Network, and through them the New Communalist embrace the politics of consciousness.” I think what this means is that due to Kelly’s contributions to the Whole Earth Catalog, along with the connections he made during his time there, Kelly brought a lot of his beliefs (and therefore the beliefs of those at Whole Earth Network) to Wired. New Communalists believed in turning to consciousness as a means for social change. For them, it was not about tearing down bureaucracy but instead they believed in a stable social order. However, after the 1994 elections, there was a shift in how government regulations were viewed. Now there was a call for deregulation, especially in the telecommunications sector. Dyson and Gingrich argued that “America was about to enter a new era, one in which technology would do away with the need for bureaucratic oversight of both market and politics.”
In their 1995 interview Dyson and Gingrich both compared the digital revolution to the birth of the American nation. In my opinion, the only difference between Dyson/Ginghrich and Wired’s first five years is that Dyson and Gingrich became lobbyists for de-regulation and getting rid of a hierarchal system whereas this was not the primary goal of the New Communalist movement. However, the ideas of the new communalist and the Whole Earth Catalog paved the way for cyber culture. Each movement had a vision of the future, and as Turner states “The rhetoric reflected a series of earlier encounters between the Whole Earth community, the technological community, and the corporate community. By the time Dyson interviewed Gingrich, the notion of business as a source of social change, of digital technology as the tool and symbol of business, and of decentralization as a social ideal were well established in the pages of Wired and in its network contributors.” In other words, the 1995 interview was a result of everything that began in the Whole Earth Network.