í Assignments

In “The Shifting Politics of the Computational Metaphor” chapter, Fred Turner explained how the New Left and the New Communalists are two different social movements but have some common characteristics. According to Turner, the New Left was primarily formed as a political movement “out of the struggles for civil rights in the Deep South and the Free Speech Movement” (p. 31). Members form political parties and protested against the Vietnam War, “industrial activities, and bureaucratic organization of the universities” (p. 34).

Similar to the New Left movement, the New Communalists also sought to challenge the bureaucracy and the cold war social order. However, unlike the New Left, they did not see politics as the solution to this. The mind was their alternative to politics. They turned away from politics as a solution for social change.

Turner also added that:
“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. Like Norbert Wiener two decades earlier, many in the counterculture saw in cybernetics a vision of a world built not around vertical hierarchies and top-down flows of power, but around looping circuits of energy and information. These circuits presented the possibility of a stable social order based not on the psychologically distressing chains of command that characterized military and corporate life, but on the ebb and flow of communication” (p. 38).

My understanding of this is that the New Left wanted to get rid of the bureaucracy and hierarchy of power, and the way the saw this was possible was through political activism. The New Communalists, on the other hand, believed not only in the mind and the transformation of consciousness as sources of the social order reform, but also in cybernetics.

Marisa Chung
11/10/15
Hybrid Assignment 9

In chapter one, Turner distinguishes the New Left from the New Communalists through the affinities of latter by a cybernetic vision of the world by looking at the two opposite perspectives and how it will shape our society.

From my understanding of this chapter, the New Left activists represented as being against war, as it takes the view from the Free Speech Movement of the 1960s, yet wanted to change the politics. They believed that the key was to use politics as their source. In contrast, New Communalists, wanted to avoid party politics, bureaucracy, as well as other organized social worlds. Their motive was to build a new community which did not focus on politics, it was the mind. They believed that if people shared the same ideas as others, then politics altogether would not be needed because they will be unified as one group. Power did not belong to anyone; it belonged to all, by building a community. In addition, technology was now used as a tool and taken advantage of due to the convenience to become part of a society, which the New Left activists would not have agreed on.

In Chapter 1 of From Cyberculture to Counterculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism, Turner speaks of “two somewhat overlapping but ultimately distinct social movements” (31) that formed as a response to the threat of technological bureaucracy felt by the youth of the 1960s. The anxieties over the peril of nuclear warfare, coupled with the uncertainties of their own professional futures, gave young people –mostly college students – the incentive to break away from mainstream society into these two groups. The first group, known as the “New Left,” grew out of the fight for civil rights and was committed to social change through protests, sit-ins, civil disobedience and the forming of political parties. Protesting the Vietnam War became their biggest cause. While this group turned toward political action, the second group Turner discusses turned toward Zen Buddhism, Beat poetry and eventually psychedelic drugs and music to enhance their consciousness. While the first group was more concerned with the betterment of society for all, the second group often referred to as “counterculture” was more concerned with their personal selves.

The counterculture was a threat to both the Right and the New Left. The Right saw their drug use and open sexual mores as a challenge to conservative American values. The New Left saw them as a threat to their political struggles and a temptation to their members to abandon their righteous fight for the more alluring hippie culture. Turner differentiates between the New Left and the Counterculture by calling our attention to what he calls the “New Communalists. “The New Communalists include the tens of thousands of counterculture members who between 1967 and 1970, broke away to form communes across the country. In forming communes they were turning away from the middle class cold war America and toward a vision of “a new nation, a land of small egalitarian communities linked to one another by a network of shared beliefs.” (33) Unlike the New Left, the new Communalists saw the value of a “free” culture in which the Internet could be expereinced as a social movement. Their movement was a movement of the mind and by turning toward consciousness they “opened new doors to mainstream culture, and particularly to high-technology research culture.” (38) They embraced cybernetics as a way to increase peer-to-peer channels of information and a vision for a better future as made evident in the 1967 poem by Richard Brautigan that Turner uses to close the chapter.

Fred Turner focuses on the New Left and the New Communalists during the Cold War era. There are many differences between the two groups that Turner makes known, however they all worked for one thing, social change. The New Left wanted to change things using politics while the New Communalist wanted to change things with a more peaceful approach; instead of politics they wanted to use the mind.

The New Left group used mainstream political tactics to try and bring on a new world of social change. It seems as though they were not trying to get rid of the power system in place but rather make it better. They involved themselves a lot with political activism so that their social movements of the time could triumph. Unlike the New Communalists, the New Left wasn’t particularly fond of the idea of cybernetics.

The New Communalists were seen as hippies because they wanted the social change by bringing out a “new, less violent, and more psychologically authentic world.” They wanted to get rid of the hierarchy of power and not focus so much on the politics that the New Left was worried about. This in turn worked in their favor as it allowed for “circles-within-circles of information and systems theory might somehow make sense not only as ideas about information, but also as evidence from the natural world for the rightness of collective polity.”

My understanding on this complex reading is as following. In the chapter “ The shifting politics of the computational metaphor” Turner introduces the idea of how technology was utilized as a source for the use of military platform. Also, he mentions how the end of the world war II triggered a transformation in American science and society as well. He mentions how before scientist and science did not interfered with other areas such as politics, military among others. this changed later on different perception as is referred in the as the ” the computational metaphor”. Moreover, he refers to the New communalist, as those who helped reform the American social structure; where the evolution of personal computer was essential away from the political spectrum . For the new communalist information, or personal knowledge, is the key to the countercultural politics. Meanwhile for the new left seeks to work with established structured trying to seek social change through the political and military forms.

In Fred Turners book, he discusses the differences between the two groups, The New left and The Communalists. They saw the Internet as flexible working systems. Material world as an information system. The computer was used for military purposes during the war. A world free of bureaucracy. The New Left sought to bring to light the issues of social rights such as Free Speech. The movement was a breakdown of a power structure that arose from the doings of protests of University students. They insisted on being heard by these means and expected to seek change in society this way. By the 1950s more people grew increasingly fearful of military’s industrial institutions and their influences. The Left saw society as “ a society dominated by pyramidal organizations” and demonstrated their distaste through rejecting and was viewed as a political movement who had activist for their cause.

The New Communalists on the other hand, seemed more liberal in their thoughts and approach to digital association and contribution to the people. They embraced the technologies that governed cyberspace innovations. They were not set on political arguments and looked towards a peaceful order within society. They were according to Turner the ones who “turned toward technology and mind as foundations of a new society”. It was more of a rebirth of a new counterculture. They felt the mind was the key to being released from their current social conditions. Rather than use politics, or activism, they rejected “industrial-era technocratic bureaucracy”.

Turner distinguishes the New Left from the New Communalists through the affinities of latter to a cybernetic vision of the world built “built not around vertical hierarchies and top down flow of power, but around looping circuits of energy and information. In his book, Turner talks about the rise of cybernetics and how it was initially used in the military during the war. He makes the point that this technology was exclusive to military personnel, thus, the top-down flow of power. Turner gives examples of how the rise of cybernetics during wartime gave rise to the New Left and the New Communalists movements. Although both movements may appear similar because it was born out of fear that the people who lived during this time possessed, Turner observes that there were differences between the two movements.
The New Left was mainly a political movement birthed by students in Port Huron, Michigan. Their driving force was the rise of the civil rights movement and the cold war which brought the threat of nuclear annihilation. The New Left believed that if bigotry ended and the world survived, a new social structure would have to be built. They believed “the goal of man and society should be to find meaning in life that is personally authentic.” To the New Left, a life that was personally authentic meant demonstrating on behalf of Free Speech rights and Black Power. They also protested industrial activities and bureaucratic organization of the universities, and against the Vietnam War. These New Lefts attempted to bring about a less violent and more psychologically satisfying society.

The New Communalists believed that the key to social change was the mind. They argued that the “myth of objective consciousness” was the problem and not the rationalized bureaucracy of the cold war. The objective of this counter culture was to “proclaim a new heaven and a new earth so vast, so marvelous that the inordinate claims of technical expertise must of necessity withdraw in the presence of such splendor to subordinate and marginal status in the lives of men.” In other words, they believed that a person’s mindset could revolutionize the world. By turning to consciousness as a means of social change, the New Communalists turned away from the political struggles that preoccupied the New Left. In doing so, they opened new doors to mainstream culture and high technology research culture. Thus, the New Communalists came to embrace the “circles within circles” of information which they believed systems theory presented. While the New Left believed in tearing down bureaucracy, New Communalists believed in the possibility of a stable social order based on the ebb and flow of communication.

Fred Turner depicts the New Communalists as being a contingent oriented primarily on changing the socio-consciousness of the era rather than achieving the progressive and leftist political shifts that the New Left organized itself around. That the New Communalists embraced the innovations of cybernetic technology is not surprising to me though it seems like the language to distinguish these two groups, the New Communalists from the New Left, is steeped in pitting a seemingly radical yet debatably apolitical ethos against a social justice centered movement wedded to effecting systemic change. The New Communalists wanted to get rid of the hierarchical structure of power and communication whereas the New Left sought to augment the structure of the systems of power in place. Both groups were informed by the unease of the Post-World War II Nuclear age that arose in during Cold War era, however the New Left took a more traditional course of action through utilizing common political organizing tactics to confront the gross inequities that American Society was facing at that time – namely via the Civil Rights movement and Anti-Vietnam War activism. This type of action characterized the types of relationships to power and information that allowed for a type of communal basis within the New Left. The New Communalists were distrustful of everybody – the left, the right, the state, and activists that were aligned with changing the state.

To me the New Communalists have a Libertarian vibe – I could definitely see some intellectual and political thinking in common with both groups – as if the N.C. begat the Libertarian movement. I guess that makes sense though as the N.C. were enthusiastic adopters and supporters of the type of university – military – science collaborative efforts to develop new cybernetic technology – an interesting amalgam of state and secular systems united to essentially think outside of the box – even though these establishments are the “box”. I guess one of the main appeals is this sort of generalist approach that the scientists and technologists brought to the collaborative efforts – the notion of workflow is not dependent on staying in ones lane per se as much as it is concerned with exploratory and entrepreneurial spirit. This is the ethos that the New Communalists seemed to thrive off of – and the objective of their desire to be a part of a consciousness shifting movement. I do understand and sort of respect the culture war that it seems like the New Communalists are depicted by Turner as waging in their awe and adoption of cybernetic innovation as it relates to a new emerging way of being or consciousness not dependent on the static systems of power that determined access and mobility of information. But anytime anyone goes off the grid or seeks to create a community that is essentially separatist or seeking to sever ties with the society from which its discontent sprung, it’s difficult for me as an outsider to not have a skeptical take on their ideological platform.

The New Left appears sort of grumpy and luddite-like in Turner’s estimation – but I suppose this is just an assessment of other writer’s depictions of the social justice led movement. I gathered that the New Left was interested in breaking down the trifecta of information – knowledge power producing machine that was the academic/military/industrial complex. I bet folks from the New Left would have been on board with a redistribution of the fruits of that cybernetic rhetoric – but my guess is that the kind of political and activist work against structural racism and the war machine that was going on precluded them from gaining access to the vested interests of that trifecta.

Perhaps I’m just jaded but I also had the sense that the New Communalists were largely white artsy weirdoes. That’s the subtext I picked up on.

Fred Turner makes clear that though they are often confused and melded together, there are distinct differences between the counterculture, the New Left and the New Communalists, though all three wanted societal change. The counterculture was actually made of people with non-political, consciousness-altering, hedonistic, and introspective ideals. Those of the New Left were outwardly politically motivated Free Speech and Civil Rights activists who wanted to move away from the nuclear and militaristic technologies developed for WWII and the cold war. The New Communalists, named after the thousands of communes they formed between 1965 and 1972, removed themselves from mainstream society to form their own egalitarian societies and connect with one another by use of cold war era technology.

The activists of the New Left were motivated by their rejection of the cold war politics in which they were raised. They feared being part of the current government led bureaucratized society that created computer and nuclear technology through the joining together of military, industry, and academia – three areas that had always operated singularly prior to WWII yet continued to work together on military projects after WWII and into the cold war. But it was the developments that occurred on the path to creating the technology that was embraced by the New Communalists. For military research and civilian research to collaborate it meant that scientists not only had to cross into fields outside of their specialties, they also had to work together with different types of sciences toward common goals. They created never used before forms of networking, created new methods in academic and scientific language to communicate, and established social orders which inspired new ways of organizing information that was greatly shared and used outside of those specific military projects by other institutions and research laboratories. Though it was thought that government involvement would create a top-down social structure, in reality nonhierarchical social management occurred to establish realms of scientific collaboration of cybernetics and systems theory.

The New Communalists embraced these new ideas in collaboration and sharing inforation but rejected industrial-era technocratic bureaucracy. They pushed for social change not through politics like the New Left but through organized ways of thinking and networking, collaborating knowledge and information from one another in effort to reclaim the humanity in society.

On one side we have the New Left, who wanted to change the politics of the country completely. They too did not believe in a hierarchy or a “top-down flow of power” but they did believe that political action was necessary to see their civil rights and free speech movements of the time succeed. The New Left organized for political change which is a contrast from what we know about the New Communalists. Also, they used protests and demonstrations against industrial activities, bureaucratic organization of the universities and the Vietnam War.

Norbert Weiner’s definition of cybernetics as stated in the chapter is “a field focused on the ‘study of messages as a means of controlling machinery and society.'” Weiner also said that cybernetics “suggested that digital processes might lead to a malevolent automation of human and biological processes.”(2006:23) Cybernetics is a “transdisciplinary approach exploring regulatory systems, their structures, constraints, and possibilities.” (Wikipedia)

When looking at this definition at first I could not figure out how the “cybernetic vision of the world” correlated with what the New Communalists wanted. Then I looked it as not just technology, but processes and systems.

So on the other side we have New Communalists, or hippies as they were also known as, and they wanted to use a collaborative process where there was no hierarchy. Most of them wanted to go in places across America where they could create communes and live without the politics of the times. New Communalists saw politics as the problem that was effecting the country at the time. They wanted a less violent society and did not trust politicians or any form of hierarchy at all. They believed that the mind could produce the ideals that they wanted in this country and go into, what Charles Reich called, Consciousness III where “citizens would serve as examples to one another; the communities in turn would serve as examples to the world.” (2006:37) Basically, the individual’s information can be passed from person to person similar to how cybernetics works within a system or process.