“Wired” and the New Right Politics
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
- 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?
- 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?
