í Assignments

Based on the readings and with a clearer understanding of the counterculture, and the different movements of the 1960’s which were the new communalist versus the new left. Fuller’s vision was to explore how necessary was it to combine different aspect of life and disciplines to help the evolution of technology. According to Fuller’s description the “comprehensive designer” is meant to be a descendent of the cold war “psychologist”. His vision was to analyze data that was collected from previous institutions, data that could later on be beneficial to other individuals. Fuller’s purpose and what made it so appealing to Stewart Brand was that he “attempted to visualize the world’s needs then and in the future, and then design technologies that would meet those needs”. Brand shares the same vision as Fuller because his vision was in accordance to human needs as well. Moreover, I believe that the presence of the Native American, its structure and other components help to shaped Brand’s vision. The Native American was organized into tribes instead of hierarchy. Brand’s ideal “was that we were all one”, meaning that if we are all equal, why have hierarchy, political structure. As explained in the reading it had a major impact in his way of perception to him and others in USCO. In accordance to new era of information and how technology was captivating all the different movements emerging in that time, the ideal of the comprehensive designer was to set aside hierarchy and instead  serve as equal to everyone.

Marisa Chung
Hybrid Assignment 10
11/17/15

This week’s reading caught my attention as soon as the story began with a little preview of what Stewart Brand wrote on his diary about the way he felt on his expectations if the Soviets invaded the United States. The short passage was extremely powerful to me and I was able to feel the fear with each word he chose to describe his terror. Along with the simple but descriptive language used in his diary, I can understand why the environment and era he grew up in effected his relationship and views of technology – as well as continuously living with a fear of one day, potentially being invaded. I was able to see that his childhood memories make an impact on the kind of person he becomes as an adult. The environment and exposure of his early years made a difference in Brand’s life, especially the way he viewed the world as a fight to become a stronger individual rather than as a society in whole.

Later, Buckminister Fuller became an inspiration to Stewart Brand with the idea of the comprehensive designer, and the vision of the world espoused by Fuller because of the way he was able to take advantage of technology rather than go against it. As Turner mentions, Fuller’s idea of comprehensive designer requires balance and current deployment of its resources. From my understanding of the reading, the comprehensive designer would have to gather all the necessary information, and then re-distribute it in ways that can be useful. However, in order for this to be successfully done, the designer basically needs to be trained, but at the same time think as an outsider. Through Fuller’s work, Brand is able to re-visit the way society can utilize technology in a way everyone can gather information in a more ‘positive’ way.

Angeline Henriquez

November 17, 2015

Digital media and Society

The Comprehensive Designer

In the chapter titled “Stewart Brand Meets the Cybernetic Counterculture” Turner further immerses us in the sociopolitical and economic environment that shaped the views of the new communalists, emphasizing how their relationship to information technology came about. In doing so, Turner introduces us to the technocratic doctrine of “architect, designer, and traveling speechmaker” Buckminster Fuller, who became an inspiration to Brand and his movement. What Fuller proposed was a view of the material world “imagined as a series of corresponding forms, each linked to every other according to invisible but omnipresent principles” (p.55) that also included the industrial production world which he advocated, influences the patterns of our natural world. To achieve this imagined world, Fuller deemed necessary an individual that was able to view the full scope, the “Comprehensive Designer” an individual who could “recognize the universal patterns inherent in nature, design new technologies in accord with these patterns and the industrial resources already created by corporations” (p.56). The purpose and ideals that the Comprehensive Designer evoked were very appealing to Brand for several reasons.

First, Fuller’s Comprehensive Designer and its ability to view the full scope satisfied Brand’s need to escape the limited scope of the fragmented “specialist” forged by the Soviet Union’s terror during the cold war. The collaboration and interdisciplinary aspect of Fuller’s doctrine offered Brand a new way to model the world in which an individual’s learning was not mandated by hierarchies, nor the state of war and politics but promoted a type of learning that required the individual to become a more wholesome and “learning participant”.

Furthermore, for Brand, growing up during the cold war meant growing up with the threat of human annihilation. Fuller’s ideology starves this fear by stating that “the proper deployment if information and technology could literally save the human species from annihilation” (p. 57) presenting the use of technology and other disciplines as vital for the evolution of humans. This aligns with Brand’s thoughts on the concept of evolution where he explains that “the responsibility of evolution is on each individual man, as fir no other species. Since the business of evolution for man has gone over to the mental and psychological phase, each person may contribute and influence heritage of the species” (p.45). In this way, for Brand, the interdisciplinary and collaborative aspect of Fuller’s ideas were not only vital to become a wholesome individual but vital for the human species as a whole.

To finalize, Fuller’s emphasize on the use of technology as a resource provided Brand with a way to think about alternative forms of communal organization. Through his work and communal living with USCO, Brand made use of technology, networking and collaboration to produce art. Tapping into the communal living and the communal production of art was in itself then, a counter move for Brand as it contradicted the rigid organizational structures of the cold war environment.

According to Fuller, the “Comprehensive Designer” would stand outside of industry and science, and would process information they produced, observing technologies and translating it into tools for happiness. This “Comprehensive Designer” was meant to restore what bureaucracy took away from society, i.e. equality. Fuller came to believe in this designer when he noticed how the world’s resources had been unevenly distributed during the Second World War. While some nations were prospering, others were stricken with poverty and Fuller believed that this “Comprehensive Designer” would be the solution to the world’s problems due to his objectivity. While corporations would always seek their interest, the “Comprehensive Designer” would seek the interest of all.

This was appealing to Brand because he too believed in a society of equality, one in which resources could be distributed equally and all people could benefit. He viewed the Native Americans as people that society should strive to be like, stating “If the White collar man of the 1950’s had become detached from the land and from his own emotions, the Native American could show him how to be home again, physically and psychologically. If the large corporations and governments of the twentieth century were organized in psychologically and socially divisive hierarchies, the world of the Native American was organized into tribes.” Brand believed that Native Americans held the key to a non-hierarchal world and he admired the way that they held a deep sense of community living. Brand’s use of psychedelic drugs mirrored the Native American way of life, where they often took various substances to achieve an altered state of mind.

I think that Brand overlooked the fact that even within the Native American community, there was still a hierarchal system in place. Tribal chiefs were often given the final say in matters affecting the community, however, they did not profit off of the community in the way that bureaucratic organizations profit off of those beneath them. In every community and society, there is usually a leader because it would be almost impossible to have a successful structure-less society. Brand came to love the idea of the “Comprehensive Designer” because he believed this person would be objective and would get rid of hierarchies. To him, the Native Americans were the closest he had come to a non-hierarchal society

Stewart Brand from a young age was fearful of living in a hyperrationalized world and becoming a cold war inspired drone, an unthinking cog in the machine of a society that would not allow him to be an individual. His own experiences in collegiate life, then the military, left him dissatisfied with bureaucratic structures in which individualism was not encouraged, though through those life experiences at Stanford, as a draftee in the army, and later exploring the art scenes of New York and San Francisco inspired promotion of cross-genre social collaboration and communal experiences. Brands ideas that were formed by these experiences were in many ways supported by Buckminster Fuller’s comprehensive designer model as Brand’s own ideal for an individualistic society.

Brand adopted the ideas that societal evolution was dependant on each person as an individual in order to contribute and influence as a mass population. In addition to reading about such biological social structures, Brand read Buckminster Fuller’s ideas that offered Brand a worldview in which the technology and information developed in military and industrial society could be embraced in a way to avoid the annihilation of our species, rather than race toward it. Fuller believed that those technologies could and should be used for the benefit of society rather than for its end. Furthermore, Fuller explained that one did not have to turn away from the current media technologies developed by “adult society” to show disapproval of bureaucratic society, rather they could still be enjoyed and ultimately used in ways to transform society and build new communities. Fuller’s vision of a “comprehensive designer,” an outsider who objectively observes, interprets and applies information from various sources for the ultimate benefit of society, a person who, like a computer can process information, was inspired by military research culture that utilized intellectual social networking. This greatly inspired Brand and is reflected in his involvement with the USCO and the New Communalists, the ultimate goals were to utilize technology to connect information -connect people- and continue to find new ways to improve society in a way in which hierarchy and politics are irrelevant.

This weeks reading was rather interesting, after having gotten the understanding from last week’s class discussion.  That insight helped me to grasp the concept relating to Brand & Fuller.  The idea of the comprehensive designer by Fuller, represents the idea of the symbiotic relationship of technology and the human capacity for creativity.  Fuller describes the “Comprehensive Designer” as people with the technological knowledge to utilize the various products of science, technology, big business, etc – but, who is not a total adherent to just one discipline, but rather someone with the ability to see, understand and imagine new and beneficial ways of translating these concepts into useful applications for the benefit of humanity in diverse ways.

For Brand, a proponent of the New Communal Movement of the 60’s counterculture, which was evidenced by his involvement with the USCO, Fuller’s concept of the “Comprehensive Designer” helped shape his work, tempered by his group’s creative and technical knowledge.  Brand was whole-heartedly against growing up to be an adult stuck in mediocrity and becoming a mindless drown of the bureaucratic hierarchy.  The freedom and almost nomadic concept of the Comprehensive Designer, represented the all encompassing aspect of embracing technology and the products it produced, with the freedom to bend and shape these tools to creating useful and beneficial expressions for humanity.  This meant that, he was free to collaborate with people of diverse knowledge and backgrounds, to achieve new ways to implement and utilize everything that was available.  Looking at these products and concepts from new and different viewpoints, could/would allow for visionaries to collaborate and imagine/design advances yet thought of; and, ultimately to share these new and innovative advances for the betterment of humanity.

To Brand, whose idealized vision of human society was a harmonious, nonhierarchical world – the idea of interdisciplinary collaboration would have seemed a natural fit to his world and way of thinking.  The abilities to process vast amounts of information, while being removed enough to see/imagine ways in which this technological information and industrial/military tools can be used, amazing benefits and ground breaking advances can be achieved.  Brand was captivated by and looked to the Native American Indians as his ideal for the “authentic and alternative community.  Brand’s ultimate goal was a de-institutionalized freedom from the constraints of government and to create a way of living that encompassed the totality of knowledge towards a “cosmic consciousness” equally and freely shared by the communal whole.

In the chapter “The shifting Politics of the Computational Metaphor” Fred Turner writes that “For both the New Left and the New Communalists, technological bureaucracy threatened a drab, psychologically distressing adulthood at a minimum and, beyond that, perhaps even the extinction of the human race. For the New Left, movement politics offered a way to tear down that bureaucracy and simultaneously to experience the intimacy of shared commitment and the possibility of an emotionally committed adulthood. For the New Communalists, in contrast, and for much of the broader counter-culture, cybernetics and systems theory offered an ideological alternative.” The New Left and The New Communalists are two different social movements but at the same time they have something in common. The New Left movement is a political movement. How I understood they was trying to change government. The New Left activists were against the war and thinking that they can use politics as the foundation. The New Communalists movement was trying to make their own society, the idea to make a society were they would leave. They were not that political, they turned away from politics and didn’t trust politicians. The New Communalist considers more peaceful. They believed that the main reason to changes is their mind.

Due by midnight Tuesday, November 17th (350-400 words).

Turner (2006:56) references Buckminster’s Fuller’s idea of the “Comprehensive Designer,” described in Fuller’s book Ideas and Integrities (1963). As Turner (2006:56) explains, “[a]ccording to Fuller, the Comprehensive Designer would not be another specialist, but would instead stand outside the halls of industry and science, processing the information they produced, observing the technologies they developed, and translating both into tools for human happiness.” Elaborating on the idea of the comprehensive designer, describe the vision of the world espoused by Fuller. Why do you think this vision was so appealing to Stewart Brand? If you are unsure, take a guess.

Fred Turner does a great deal to disambiguate the often monolithic idea of “the counterculture” we’re presented with in latter day retellings of the 1960s. He draws sharp distinctions, in particular, between the political movement that was the New Left and the lifestyle movement that characterized the New Communalists. Where the New Left believed that organizing political parties, staging direct actions and creating an alternative political structure as a means of achieving social democracy, for the New Communalists, institutionalism was itself inherently flawed and the goal was not so much to subvert it as to opt out of it altogether. The New Left largely emerged as a bloc of white college educated students who borrowed from philosophical and political critiques of capitalism to frame a critique of the encroaching blend of military and industry. They decried the blend of man and machine as ultimately destructive and likely to bring about rationalist subjugation if not total annihilation. New Communalists, conversely, were less dismayed by the blend of military and industry per se than they were by the notion of hierarchical structures in general. They blended esoteric philosophies with a form of libertarianism that sought a society that was generally flatter and more internally focused. The inward journey toward an elevation of consciousness as the principals means of liberation from society as it was naturally dovetailed with the early promises of cyberneticists, who theorized that the merger of man and tool, or, more specifically, man and machine, could upend social relationships and alter our understanding of what it meant to be human. The systems theory that resulted out of the interdisciplinary atmosphere from which the cyberneticists hailed easily appealed to the New Communalists, according to Turner. Systems theory’s lionization of non-bureaucratic interrelations coincided neatly with the New Communalists ideas of autonomous networked communities working outside the mainstream. Turner argues that neither the New Left nor the New Communalists were operating outside the mainstream in any authentic way and neither were subverted by capitalism as much as simply as simply an outgrowth of it. This aligns with several of the Scholz readings, most notably Terranova, who argues that both digital culture and economy are deeply linked to capitalism and not operating outside as a new social order, having descended from the miraculous digital ether. The New Communalists as cultural antecedents to the modern internet certainly explains a lot of the modern optimism within the industry and even the emergence of the notion of Technological Singularity in the popular consciousness (an idea, perhaps not coincidentally, reported on at length in the Whole Earth Review and written about extensively by both Stewart Brand and Kevin Kelly).

Most of my understanding of Communalism comes from Murray Bookchin and seems somewhat different from the New Communalist movement Turner is here describing as Bookchin’s version is a clear outgrowth of the politics of the New Left. As such, I’m left to wonder if he may be making the same error of generalization about communalism that he criticizes historians for making when conflating the counterculture as an amorphous mass.

Angeline Henriquez

Digital Media and Society

November 10, 2015

The New Left and the New Communalists

In the chapter titled “The shifting Politics of the Computational Metaphor” Turner explores how branches within countercultures have differing relationships to information technologies. More specifically, he explains how the emergence of the New Left and the New Communalists has its roots in the war and post-war environment of the 1950s and 1960s where free speech movements started proposing the idea that the knowledge taking place in universities was inherently entangled with the military-industrial complex. In this way, free speech movement supporters were concerned that knowledge and information were being fragmented to fit the necessities of the political environment of the time and that students were then being deems as part of the machine. Turner writes “the university generated new knowledge and new workers for an emerging ‘information society’. In that sense…the university was an information machine.” (p. 12). This implied then, that university was underpinned by a hierarchy system, and the students opposed to being used as parts to a machine or bits of information. They refused to be compared to the two-dimensional dullness of an IBM card. “The transformation of the self into data on an IBM card marked the height of dehumanization.” (p.16)

However, Tuner alludes that there was an openness in this seemingly closed world that has been forgotten by historians. He highlights that the war environment provided a platform for new technologies to be produced, and allowed for multiple disciplines in universities to work together in a system of collaboration rather than in a hierarchy system. “The laboratories within which the research and development too place witnessed a flourishing of nonhierarchical, interdisciplinary collaboration.” (p. 18). This environment of collaboration seemed to be obscured when it resulted in the production of the atomic bomb, exposing to many, that decisions made in in the higher tiers of the hierarchy affected the everyday lives of individuals. “Some men come to occupy positions in American society from which they can look down upon… and by their decisions mightily affect, the everyday worlds of ordinary men and women” (p.29) From here stemmed the ideologies that forged the New Left. Having understood that a new kind of social structure would have to take place, the New Left “took activism to be the fundamental mission of the movement” (p. 35), Turner’s argument is that they did so while still using the traditional political tactics. New Communalists however, while also pushing for a new kind of social structure considered that “political activism was at best beside the point and at worst part of the problem.” (p.35). The New Communalists considered a change of consciousness as the answer to significant social change and if they were to focus on changing the mind first, it was logical to them that this cannot be separated from information. “Information would have to become a key part of countercultural politics.” (p.38) viewing cybernetics and systems theory as a viable alternative to overthrow hierarchies and promote a system of collaboration through which the flow of information could reach and change consciousness.