5 Hybrid Assignment 12

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.

Due by midnight Tuesday, December 8th (350-400 words).

Part 1. Turner (2006:208-9) 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.” How does Turner connect these early affiliations with the interview in the August 1995 issue of Wired between Esther Dyson and Newt Gingrich?

Part 2. Point to a passage from chapter 6 and craft one or two questions that will help guide our discussion next week.