Hybrid assignment 12
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.
