Hybrid Assignment 12 – Jessie Salfen
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.
