å Thursday, December 10th, 2015

Due by midnight Tuesday, December 15th (350-400 words).

For our final hybrid assignment, please take some time to reflect on what you will take away from this course. Thinking back to the first day of class, when we reflected on how digital media structures our daily lives, it becomes immediately clear how much ground we have covered. If you were asked to answer this question again, what would you say? If possible, please include details about the readings you enjoyed the most and why. Also address what readings and topics were the most difficult for you.

Well, this chapter focused on making it abundantly clear that the network of corporate/political alliances that arose through the pages of WIRED during the first five years of the magazine had long reaching effects on the shape that the web and its attendant technologies assumed. Basically the web and the world look the way they do because of the affiliations between the ideological and technical impressions that that WIRED gang penned and partnered with actual politicians that were socially conservative and had their hands in creating legislation that would make the development of various technologies and the corporate structures from which they issued free to do as they wanted. Esther Dyson and Newt Gingrich go on to write “The Magna Carta for the Knowledge Age” which later becomes the guiding principle to Gingrich’s efforts (successful) to deregulate the telecommunications industry. People want to make money and want to feel free to do so – without any legislative restrictions to hold them accountable to the means by which they do so – and to ward off any socially inspired pangs of conflict over what they do. Gingrich and his political base to render, in absolute terms, personal freedoms with corporate deregulation, utilized the “Magna Carta” that these two created. This document was like a Manifest Destiny for the “frontier of cyberspace” and in my impression replicates much of what American exceptionalism is about – that entrepreneurial and vigilante sensibility specific to the business individualism that stands in for the idea of freedom.

Part II

I always find it bizarre when an obvious spiritual guru or pundit partners with the corporate sector to develop interpersonal pedagogy for business relations, or rather when an aforementioned mystical figures ideology is utilized for business minded ends. (Thinking about the mention of Gurdjieff’s “Remarkable Men” concept as employed by Pierre Wack at Shell.) This occurs on page 185.

Drawing on the mish mash of information that Turner provides in chapter 6, I can see how this trend was established via the Global Business Network and their web of connections, though nothing about it seems remarkable to me or even slightly different than what I imagine the Business/Corporate sector operated like, pre-cold war New Communalist “innovation”.

Isn’t it all just nepotism and an elite class protecting its interconnected interests? That’s literally my question.

Like what even is the remarkable social change that this global business network is achieving? Do they just feel better about how they extract resources and labor from the global south because they incorporate more holistic activities into their managerial profile?

In many ways this chapter is like a confirmation of whatever off the wall conspiracy theories one could conjure about the corporate tech elite. I don’t really feel swayed by the jargon that Turner parrots in this chapter – all the talk about these networks bonding together and seeking to unify their business goals with vaguely New Communalist socio-ethics and consciousness is really tiresome. I don’t know what that means, even with the pages and pages of detailed historical charting.

I suppose the only piece that seemed personally relevant or of interest was the mention of Paul Hawken – the organic grocer/founder of Erewhon Trading Company and later Smith & Hawken gardening supply company. My best friend used to work for Smith & Hawken, and I am very familiar with Erewhon – the natural foods brand. I used to work in the Health and Wellness industry and watched Whole Foods become the behemoth that it is (specifically in New York City) over the last 13 years. The CEO and “spiritual” founder of Whole Foods Market is a man named John Mackey – a noted multi-millionaire, organic foods proponent, and libertarian. He wrote a book called conscious capitalism (cringe) and is himself a mish mash of holistic seeming eco-ethics and terrible labor practices.

All that to say, I wonder if perhaps the influence of the particular confluence of socially indebted change making that the Global Business Network derived from its blend of New Communalist derived interdisciplinary and politically conscious, information systems informed networking has rubbed off on other industries outside of the tech bubble climate. We see this with the big players mentioned in chapter 6 – shell, and other evil empires, but I am wondering if we see can trace this methodology of doing business to other arenas – such as lifestyle peddling empires like Whole Foods Market. I would identify Mark Zuckerberg as an heir to this innovation – not just because he wields the (arguably) most powerful social practice technology to have arisen in this century – but because the earnestness of his ideas about connection harken back to a lot of what the New Communalist networks were about – trading information and building relationships via platforms such as the Whole Earth Catalog and the WeLL.

What figure would you identify as belonging to this kind of social/business practice enterprise mentality?

At the chapter 7 “Wired”, 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 in large part from its intellectual and interpersonal affiliations with Kevin Kelly and the Whole Earth network and, through them, from the New Communalist embrace of the politics of consciousness.” The magazine “Wired”, Turner argues, was as much a lifestyle magazine promoting social and cultural networks as much as a computer magazine promoting technical networks, “There are a lot of magazines about technology. Wired is not one of them. Wired is about the most powerful people on the planet today—the Digital Generation. These are the people who not only foresaw how the merger of computers, telecommunications and the media is transforming life at the cusp of the new millennium, they are making it happen”. Wired magazine was as an ideological consequence of the Whole Earth ideology. Turner argues that, contrary to conventional accounts that explain how Wired magazine developed out of a libertarian political philosophy, it actually had one foot in the Whole Earth ideology as well. I am sorry but I didn’t understand the chapter completely, it got me a little confuses. It is hard for me to answer the question.