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From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism
In the early 1960s, computers haunted the American popular imagination. Bleak tools of the cold war, they embodied the rigid organization and mechanical conformity that made the military-industrial complex possible. But by the 1990s—and the dawn of the Internet—computers started to represent a very different kind of world: a collaborative and digital utopia modeled on the communal ideals of the hippies who so vehemently rebelled against the cold war establishment in the first place.
From Counterculture to Cyberculture is the first book to explore this extraordinary and ironic transformation. Fred Turner here traces the previously untold story of a highly influential group of San Francisco Bay–area entrepreneurs: Stewart Brand and the Whole Earth network. Between 1968 and 1998, via such familiar venues as the National Book Award–winning Whole Earth Catalog, the computer conferencing system known as WELL, and, ultimately, the launch of the wildly successful Wired magazine, Brand and his colleagues brokered a long-running collaboration between San Francisco flower power and the emerging technological hub of Silicon Valley. Thanks to their vision, counterculturalists and technologists alike joined together to reimagine computers as tools for personal liberation, the building of virtual and decidedly alternative communities, and the exploration of bold new social frontiers.
Shedding new light on how our networked culture came to be, this fascinating book reminds us that the distance between the Grateful Dead and Google, between Ken Kesey and the computer itself, is not as great as we might think.
From Counterculture to Cyberculture is the first book to explore this extraordinary and ironic transformation. Fred Turner here traces the previously untold story of a highly influential group of San Francisco Bay–area entrepreneurs: Stewart Brand and the Whole Earth network. Between 1968 and 1998, via such familiar venues as the National Book Award–winning Whole Earth Catalog, the computer conferencing system known as WELL, and, ultimately, the launch of the wildly successful Wired magazine, Brand and his colleagues brokered a long-running collaboration between San Francisco flower power and the emerging technological hub of Silicon Valley. Thanks to their vision, counterculturalists and technologists alike joined together to reimagine computers as tools for personal liberation, the building of virtual and decidedly alternative communities, and the exploration of bold new social frontiers.
Shedding new light on how our networked culture came to be, this fascinating book reminds us that the distance between the Grateful Dead and Google, between Ken Kesey and the computer itself, is not as great as we might think.
327 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2006
About the author
Fred Turner
23 books35 followersFred Turner is associate professor of communication at Stanford University. He previously taught at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Prior to his academic career, he was a journalist for over ten years, writing for the Boston Phoenix, Boston Sunday Globe, and other publications.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 78 reviews
April 2, 2016
This is a sad story in many ways: I wonder if the author realises quite how sad it is. The story he seems to want to tell is about how the idealism and independence of the American counterculture fed into the burgeoning digital technology industry, infusing the world of early computing with radical, egalitarian ideas. But what actually comes across more strongly than anything is the notion that, even before it got started, Silicon Valley had been thoroughly coopted by right-wing politics and corporate interests.
Newt Gingrich on the cover of Wired, August 1995
Turner's basic argument is that the digital communications world was always a hybrid of two different legacies – ‘that of the military-industrial research culture, which first appeared during World War II and flourished across the cold war era, and that of the American counterculture’. Where the prevailing narrative sees 1960s youth culture as a rejection of the cold war world, Turner instead goes to great (possibly tedious) lengths to demonstrate that, in fact, ‘the communards of the back-to-the-land movement often embraced the collaborative social practices, the celebration of technology, and the cybernetic rhetoric of mainstream military-industrial-academic research.’
Symbolising this productive mixture, in Turner's view, is the mercurial writer-cum-businessman-cum-futurist Stewart Brand, who spent the 1960s as one of Ken Kesey's Merry Pranksters, and, now aged 77, is still going strong as an active director of various eco-technological think-tanks and quangoes. His major work was the Whole Earth Catalog, an odd, of-its-time publication which combined articles on self-sufficiency with mail-order listings for a range of inspirational books, DIY tools, frontiersman clothing, and assorted accoutrements. It was popular with hippies and commune-dwellers – and, because it depended on user contributions for its reviews and editorials, it also became enormously influential among those who would go on to build the new technological world. Steve Jobs, for instance, called the Whole Earth Catalog ‘one of the bibles of my generation…sort of like Google in paperback form’.
Some pages from the Whole Earth Catalog…‘an overflow of information’
It's hard to overstate the adulation with which the kind of people who read the Catalog greeted the emergence of microcomputers and digital communications. For them, the interconnectedness of an online world offered ‘the image of an ideal society: decentralized, egalitarian, harmonious, and free’. It was an optimistic, quintessentially American (as I see it) idealism which was enshrined in the first online communities like The WELL, in companies like Apple, and which was communicated to the world by Wired magazine – for all of whom
However, it turned out that this vision of self-sufficiency and entrepreneurship with minimal government interference was – as Turner puts it – ‘in many ways quite congenial to the insurgent Republicans of the 1990s’. Right-wingers began organising digital conferences, pallying up to the big names, and in return winning approbation and promotion from the digital community. And unfortunately, just as the countercultural call for ‘responsibility for the people’ was taken up by Republicans, so also was a general turning away from the poor and disadvantaged, and indeed away from non-white populations, that had characterised many of the countercultural projects like the back-to-the-land movement.
The result of all this was that, yes, the digital revolution was always dominated by ideas of self-sufficiency and non-regulation; but it was also always dominated by the welcoming of corporate control and by a generally white male technocratic sensibility, with all the positive and negative connotations those things imply.
It's definitely an important story, but to be honest I felt I had to work a little too hard to make it out in this book. I was never really convinced of Stewart Brand's central importance to the whole tale, and some chapters just seemed to devolve into lists of dates and people who worked with him on various tangentially-related projects. I had never heard of Brand before, and perhaps if you already know about him then you don't need to be told why he matters; I did, and I wasn't.
This was recommended to me over What the Dormouse Said, a book which came out at the same time and which tells a similar story – I'd be interested to know if that one would have suited me better, because this – although the story it tells is fundamentally interesting – is a bit of a slog.
Newt Gingrich on the cover of Wired, August 1995
Turner's basic argument is that the digital communications world was always a hybrid of two different legacies – ‘that of the military-industrial research culture, which first appeared during World War II and flourished across the cold war era, and that of the American counterculture’. Where the prevailing narrative sees 1960s youth culture as a rejection of the cold war world, Turner instead goes to great (possibly tedious) lengths to demonstrate that, in fact, ‘the communards of the back-to-the-land movement often embraced the collaborative social practices, the celebration of technology, and the cybernetic rhetoric of mainstream military-industrial-academic research.’
Symbolising this productive mixture, in Turner's view, is the mercurial writer-cum-businessman-cum-futurist Stewart Brand, who spent the 1960s as one of Ken Kesey's Merry Pranksters, and, now aged 77, is still going strong as an active director of various eco-technological think-tanks and quangoes. His major work was the Whole Earth Catalog, an odd, of-its-time publication which combined articles on self-sufficiency with mail-order listings for a range of inspirational books, DIY tools, frontiersman clothing, and assorted accoutrements. It was popular with hippies and commune-dwellers – and, because it depended on user contributions for its reviews and editorials, it also became enormously influential among those who would go on to build the new technological world. Steve Jobs, for instance, called the Whole Earth Catalog ‘one of the bibles of my generation…sort of like Google in paperback form’.
Some pages from the Whole Earth Catalog…‘an overflow of information’
It's hard to overstate the adulation with which the kind of people who read the Catalog greeted the emergence of microcomputers and digital communications. For them, the interconnectedness of an online world offered ‘the image of an ideal society: decentralized, egalitarian, harmonious, and free’. It was an optimistic, quintessentially American (as I see it) idealism which was enshrined in the first online communities like The WELL, in companies like Apple, and which was communicated to the world by Wired magazine – for all of whom
the Internet, and digital communication generally, stood as the prototype of a newly decentralized, nonhierarchical society linked by invisible bits in a single harmonious network. […C]yberspace offered what LSD, Christian mysticism, cybernetics, and countercultural “energy” theory had all promised: transpersonal communion.
However, it turned out that this vision of self-sufficiency and entrepreneurship with minimal government interference was – as Turner puts it – ‘in many ways quite congenial to the insurgent Republicans of the 1990s’. Right-wingers began organising digital conferences, pallying up to the big names, and in return winning approbation and promotion from the digital community. And unfortunately, just as the countercultural call for ‘responsibility for the people’ was taken up by Republicans, so also was a general turning away from the poor and disadvantaged, and indeed away from non-white populations, that had characterised many of the countercultural projects like the back-to-the-land movement.
The result of all this was that, yes, the digital revolution was always dominated by ideas of self-sufficiency and non-regulation; but it was also always dominated by the welcoming of corporate control and by a generally white male technocratic sensibility, with all the positive and negative connotations those things imply.
It's definitely an important story, but to be honest I felt I had to work a little too hard to make it out in this book. I was never really convinced of Stewart Brand's central importance to the whole tale, and some chapters just seemed to devolve into lists of dates and people who worked with him on various tangentially-related projects. I had never heard of Brand before, and perhaps if you already know about him then you don't need to be told why he matters; I did, and I wasn't.
This was recommended to me over What the Dormouse Said, a book which came out at the same time and which tells a similar story – I'd be interested to know if that one would have suited me better, because this – although the story it tells is fundamentally interesting – is a bit of a slog.
May 8, 2021
brain blowing up rn
June 22, 2021
totally didn't finish this book way after i was supposed to ❤️🥰😇 overall, a fascinating read, was a bit dry at times (lots of names + events to keep track of), but a super trenchant analysis / history of cyberculture & Californian ideology vibes; last chapter is especially excellent for summary, synthesis, and forceful argument about the shortcomings of new communalism / techno-libertarianism
Want to read
October 26, 2018James Currier recommends
August 5, 2022
If there's an iconic figure of the 21st century, it's the technological entrepreneur. You know the type, the saavy, cool, cutting-edge, networked, leveraged, foresighted thought leader. The kind of person who makes a lot of money by not doing better than the competition, but by blazing whole new economic sectors. That figure is a kind of mediated chimera in the mold of the Original, the central subject of this book, one Stewart Brand.
Turner's book is an intellectual career of Brand, from itinerant avanta-garde son et luminere artist, to his major success of the Whole Earth Catalog, to the WELL community, and finally Brand's ascension to the sage of Wired, and the entire Bay Area techster lifestyle. It's a long and somewhat convoluted journey, interspersed with some pretty dense science and technology studies jargon, and with a few leaps of faith. It is also a masterpiece of scholarship, and a great example of what an STS book should do.
For Americans in the 1950s and 1960s, the computer had a singular, sinister vision. Computerization was the logic of dehumanization, of doomsday. Psychologically fragmented 'organization men' served as cogs in a horrific machine, which gobbled up nature and culture in its juggernaut like roll towards nuclear annihilation. The actual practice of computer engineering (intimately tied to defense via the needs of the SAGE air defense network and aerospace miniaturization) was actually rather open, interdisciplinary, and innovative, albeit behind barbed wire fences and security clearances. This was the culture that created Nobert Weiner's cybernetics and Claude Shannon's information theory, along with Buckminster Fuller's radical designs.
There's little in Brand's childhood that distinguished him as a future radical; A midwestern suburban youth, Stanford, Army ROTC, a brief stint in the Rangers, and a job as military photographer. But when he mustered out, with a deep feeling that 'this could not go on', he fell into the emergent counterculture. The first influence was the USCO media art collective, which combined experiments with light and sound with psychedelic drugs, but Brand made contacts everywhere. Turner distinguishes two major threads in 60s politics. The New Left were hardheaded organizers, working against racism and the Vietnam War with actions that confronted the American system. The New Communalism, which Brand became a part of, took an entirely different attitude towards social change.
For New Communalism, politics itself was the problem, and consciousness was the solution. By changing minds, individually and then en mass, the counterculture could simply float out of American society. Music, aesthetics, drugs, meditation, and a return to the land symbolized a chance to break free. Brand's genius was the Whole Earth Catalog, a sprawling publication that presented the building blocks of the New Communalism between its covers, juxtaposing books, homesteading essentials, and the latest electronics as 'tools for thinking more clearly'.
The Whole Earth Catalog was an outlandish success, winning awards and selling millions of copies. Xerox PARC stocked it's library by getting one of everything in the WEC. PARC has a much better claim on building the digital modernity than anyone in Turner's book, see Markoff's What The Dormouse Said for details. But as Brand's star ascended, the New Communalism collapsed, as thousands of communes failed under the gritty problems of subsistence farming, separating from the American economy, and predatory charismatic leaders and various kinds of bums.
Many members of the New Communalist movement went back to various square jobs, but they stayed in touch, a loose network around the Bay Area. Brand himself kept publishing and operated a small non-profit foundation focused on various artistic and technological ideas. In 1985, Brand organized the WELL, the Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link, a message board server that linked together many of his friends and contacts in a personal computing-centric version of the New Communalism.
The personal computer and networking were the technologies that Brand had been waiting for his entire life, the tools that would enable a person to craft an entirely new identity in a world free from the obsolete governments and ideologies of the past. Brand managed a simultaneous double jump at this point. On one side, he managed to cash in, founding the Global Business Network consultancy firm, an exclusive, corporate-centric, and for-profit version of the WELL vision. For the radicals, he also helped organize the first hacker conference in 1984, bringing together the old idealists of the 1960s with the next generation of entrepreneurs and programmers, gathering hippies, ruthless capitalists along the lines of Bill Gates, and semi-criminal computer crackers going by arcane message board handles handles.
Turner's story closes out with Wired magazine, and the embrace of the new business friendly high-tech cyber utopianism by Newt Gingrich. His story ends just before the first dotcom crash, and the 21st century world of FAANGs, monopolistic platforms, app stores, the sharing economy, meme warfare, and all the other problems of the late 2010s.
Turner is up front about the seductive power of Brand's vision. These days, when PCs are pocket sized and John Berry Barlow's cyberspace frontier fenced in by tech titans, it's easy to sneer. But Brand imagined a better world, and with great humor and self-effacement, brought together the people who made it happen. Stewart Brand is not exactly a household name, yet he's indirectly responsible what makes my household different than my parent's household (and yes, my mom does have a paper copy of The Last Whole Earth Catalog on a shelf somewhere). At the same time, the important parts of Brand's vision never real worked. Consciousness may have been raised temporarily, but it always fell back to earth. Most of the new communities failed almost instantaneously. In practice, these new pioneers were very male and very white, same as the last bunch. The web was commercialized, and the ungoverned spaces are not democratic forums, but nightmarish collective ids; our darkest desires for violence, drugs, and illicit pornography made real.
A few decades on, the legacy of digital utopianism is a clearly one of collapse into incoherence. But what saves this book is the grace of love. Turner loves his subject, he loves the possibilities, and that love shines through. There are more adjectives than a typical academic editor would allow, and that's something I love. Turner shows how it's possible to offer critique without being critical.
Turner's book is an intellectual career of Brand, from itinerant avanta-garde son et luminere artist, to his major success of the Whole Earth Catalog, to the WELL community, and finally Brand's ascension to the sage of Wired, and the entire Bay Area techster lifestyle. It's a long and somewhat convoluted journey, interspersed with some pretty dense science and technology studies jargon, and with a few leaps of faith. It is also a masterpiece of scholarship, and a great example of what an STS book should do.
For Americans in the 1950s and 1960s, the computer had a singular, sinister vision. Computerization was the logic of dehumanization, of doomsday. Psychologically fragmented 'organization men' served as cogs in a horrific machine, which gobbled up nature and culture in its juggernaut like roll towards nuclear annihilation. The actual practice of computer engineering (intimately tied to defense via the needs of the SAGE air defense network and aerospace miniaturization) was actually rather open, interdisciplinary, and innovative, albeit behind barbed wire fences and security clearances. This was the culture that created Nobert Weiner's cybernetics and Claude Shannon's information theory, along with Buckminster Fuller's radical designs.
There's little in Brand's childhood that distinguished him as a future radical; A midwestern suburban youth, Stanford, Army ROTC, a brief stint in the Rangers, and a job as military photographer. But when he mustered out, with a deep feeling that 'this could not go on', he fell into the emergent counterculture. The first influence was the USCO media art collective, which combined experiments with light and sound with psychedelic drugs, but Brand made contacts everywhere. Turner distinguishes two major threads in 60s politics. The New Left were hardheaded organizers, working against racism and the Vietnam War with actions that confronted the American system. The New Communalism, which Brand became a part of, took an entirely different attitude towards social change.
For New Communalism, politics itself was the problem, and consciousness was the solution. By changing minds, individually and then en mass, the counterculture could simply float out of American society. Music, aesthetics, drugs, meditation, and a return to the land symbolized a chance to break free. Brand's genius was the Whole Earth Catalog, a sprawling publication that presented the building blocks of the New Communalism between its covers, juxtaposing books, homesteading essentials, and the latest electronics as 'tools for thinking more clearly'.
The Whole Earth Catalog was an outlandish success, winning awards and selling millions of copies. Xerox PARC stocked it's library by getting one of everything in the WEC. PARC has a much better claim on building the digital modernity than anyone in Turner's book, see Markoff's What The Dormouse Said for details. But as Brand's star ascended, the New Communalism collapsed, as thousands of communes failed under the gritty problems of subsistence farming, separating from the American economy, and predatory charismatic leaders and various kinds of bums.
Many members of the New Communalist movement went back to various square jobs, but they stayed in touch, a loose network around the Bay Area. Brand himself kept publishing and operated a small non-profit foundation focused on various artistic and technological ideas. In 1985, Brand organized the WELL, the Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link, a message board server that linked together many of his friends and contacts in a personal computing-centric version of the New Communalism.
The personal computer and networking were the technologies that Brand had been waiting for his entire life, the tools that would enable a person to craft an entirely new identity in a world free from the obsolete governments and ideologies of the past. Brand managed a simultaneous double jump at this point. On one side, he managed to cash in, founding the Global Business Network consultancy firm, an exclusive, corporate-centric, and for-profit version of the WELL vision. For the radicals, he also helped organize the first hacker conference in 1984, bringing together the old idealists of the 1960s with the next generation of entrepreneurs and programmers, gathering hippies, ruthless capitalists along the lines of Bill Gates, and semi-criminal computer crackers going by arcane message board handles handles.
Turner's story closes out with Wired magazine, and the embrace of the new business friendly high-tech cyber utopianism by Newt Gingrich. His story ends just before the first dotcom crash, and the 21st century world of FAANGs, monopolistic platforms, app stores, the sharing economy, meme warfare, and all the other problems of the late 2010s.
Turner is up front about the seductive power of Brand's vision. These days, when PCs are pocket sized and John Berry Barlow's cyberspace frontier fenced in by tech titans, it's easy to sneer. But Brand imagined a better world, and with great humor and self-effacement, brought together the people who made it happen. Stewart Brand is not exactly a household name, yet he's indirectly responsible what makes my household different than my parent's household (and yes, my mom does have a paper copy of The Last Whole Earth Catalog on a shelf somewhere). At the same time, the important parts of Brand's vision never real worked. Consciousness may have been raised temporarily, but it always fell back to earth. Most of the new communities failed almost instantaneously. In practice, these new pioneers were very male and very white, same as the last bunch. The web was commercialized, and the ungoverned spaces are not democratic forums, but nightmarish collective ids; our darkest desires for violence, drugs, and illicit pornography made real.
A few decades on, the legacy of digital utopianism is a clearly one of collapse into incoherence. But what saves this book is the grace of love. Turner loves his subject, he loves the possibilities, and that love shines through. There are more adjectives than a typical academic editor would allow, and that's something I love. Turner shows how it's possible to offer critique without being critical.
October 10, 2015
This book was a massive disappointment. I had been wanting to read it for so long and had really been looking forward to it. I had heard about the Whole Earth Catalog and Whole Earth Review and their respective influences for years, and I had been on The WELL for over a decade myself (sch@well.com) and thought it was the best BBS ever devised, and of course Wired Magazine was awesome, so I knew this book had to be cool as hell. Boy, was I wrong. I actually almost finished it, almost made it 300 pages through before giving up in disgust. I don't know how you could take such a COOL topic or topics such as Stewart Brand, 60s/70s counterculture, the invention and growth of the Internet, the importance of the Whole Earth Catalog, the influence of The WELL, the influence of Wired, the growth of the New Economy, and so much more, and make it SO DAMN BORING!!! God, this book sucks. It reads like a bad doctoral dissertation, which I guess should come as little surprise since Turner got his PhD at UC San Diego and taught or teaches at Stanford. He's writing to his academic cronies and I guess he's writing to impress them, but it's definitely not for laymen, because he takes a chronology of events, times, places, people, things, happenings, big ideas, etc, et al, and bores you to tears while also beating you over the head with redundancy until you want to bash your head into a concrete wall. This is frankly one of the worst written books I've ever had the misfortune to read and I have no doubt that if ANY other decent writer out there had undertaken to write a book about similar topics, they could have written an engaging, enlightening, entertaining and cool book that would have captured most readers' attentions. Instead, this garbage kills any interest I've ever had in the subject and I'm almost embarrassed now to have been on such a cool and influential BBS as The WELL after Turner has turned his destructive powers of total boredom on it. I'm giving the book two stars instead of one because the topic is good, but the book is not. Most definitely not recommended. I can't stress that enough.
July 29, 2013
This book shed light on how the many threads of contemporary cyberculture interrelate. It's no accident that there is a loose affinity between the EFF, Wired, and Burning Man. Now I know why.
May 15, 2020
Extremely interesting to read a book--very good in its own terms--that was written by an informed historian at a time when it made sense to contemplate the possibility that the new digital technologies would lead us to a Utopian world of human connection that subverted capitalist modes of domination. Not quite.
For me, though, the center of the book is the first half or so that explores the counterculture's combination of pastoral utopianism (think communes--especially those like New Buffalo outside Taos and Drop City near Trinidad, Colorado) and an embrace of technologies with their roots in the Cold War military-industrial complex. Turner has researched the field thoroughly and he makes effective use of Peter Gallison's notion of "contact zones" as sites of multidisciplinary interchange to describe the way Stewart Brand adapted Norbert Weiner, Buckminister Fuller and Marshall McLuhan as he was assembling the Whole Earth Catalog.
I've just recently read through the related literature and its one of the strongest subfields of Sixties studies. It doesn't matter whether you read this or Counterculture Green first, but together they make an absolutely convincing case for the Whole Earth Catalog as one of the most important, if slightly misunderstood, aspects of the Sixties.
For me, though, the center of the book is the first half or so that explores the counterculture's combination of pastoral utopianism (think communes--especially those like New Buffalo outside Taos and Drop City near Trinidad, Colorado) and an embrace of technologies with their roots in the Cold War military-industrial complex. Turner has researched the field thoroughly and he makes effective use of Peter Gallison's notion of "contact zones" as sites of multidisciplinary interchange to describe the way Stewart Brand adapted Norbert Weiner, Buckminister Fuller and Marshall McLuhan as he was assembling the Whole Earth Catalog.
I've just recently read through the related literature and its one of the strongest subfields of Sixties studies. It doesn't matter whether you read this or Counterculture Green first, but together they make an absolutely convincing case for the Whole Earth Catalog as one of the most important, if slightly misunderstood, aspects of the Sixties.
February 27, 2016
Turner presents a clear articulation of the rhetorical and ideological history of Silicon Valley, drawing a direct line of influence from counterculture communalism all the way through to = utopian visions of the early internet’s potential for social empowerment and connection at small and intimate scales. He also accounts for the sometimes paradoxical focus on neoliberal individualism and communal openness expressed by technologists. As such, Turner’s work holds up as useful primer for unpacking the rhetoric and ideology behind ongoing political and market forces that continue to play out in Silicon Valley battles involving companies like AirBNB and Uber. Turner also describes at length the “cultural entrepreneurialism” work of this network, acting not as journalists, but as what will later become known as “thought leaders,” “influencers,” “gurus” of technology culture, publishing their ideas and shaping the cultural discourse.
Repetitive at times, the seams of stitched together academic papers show through from chapter to chapter. And though focused on revealing the importance of a political and cultural ideology within a network of people, Turner tells the story from the perspective of the lone genius entrepreneur. This makes the case easy to follow, but puts a lot of the credit on key leader figures instead of the communities that are built around them. No doubt, these leaders had and continue to have operative roles in shaping the discourse and the networks they built up, but as a structuring and narrative lens, it now feels incomplete or lopsided to focus primarily on the many published manifestoes of those voices.
Repetitive at times, the seams of stitched together academic papers show through from chapter to chapter. And though focused on revealing the importance of a political and cultural ideology within a network of people, Turner tells the story from the perspective of the lone genius entrepreneur. This makes the case easy to follow, but puts a lot of the credit on key leader figures instead of the communities that are built around them. No doubt, these leaders had and continue to have operative roles in shaping the discourse and the networks they built up, but as a structuring and narrative lens, it now feels incomplete or lopsided to focus primarily on the many published manifestoes of those voices.
August 26, 2020
Enlightening overview of the historical trajectory of cyberculture and its post-WWII origins. It's a particularly interesting history in itself, even if it weren't also a great explanation for the current ethos of Silicon Valley. Brand deftly wove his countercultural/New Communalist vision (springing from the same military-academic-industrial research labs that ironically was part of the genesis of the nuclear-holocaust Cheerful Robot hell they shunned) with computer technologies -- and ultimately New Right ideologies. It shows how fundamental rhetoric-building was to the direction of digital technologies, and how fundamentally political information technology has always been and continues to be. Only downside is that it can be a bit repetitive and long-winded; still, fascinating read.
Particularly interesting parts: the centrality of small-scale, individualist visions for technology; the religious metaphors of disembodied communion and transcendence; the positing of Whole Earth readers as "gods" who "might as well get good at it"; the development and enactment of network theory; the confusion of liberty with deregulation; the insufficiency of "apolitical" escapist "lifestyles"; the tendency of elitist nonhierarchies to perpetuate the same social and economic pressures they are attempting to escape from.
Particularly interesting parts: the centrality of small-scale, individualist visions for technology; the religious metaphors of disembodied communion and transcendence; the positing of Whole Earth readers as "gods" who "might as well get good at it"; the development and enactment of network theory; the confusion of liberty with deregulation; the insufficiency of "apolitical" escapist "lifestyles"; the tendency of elitist nonhierarchies to perpetuate the same social and economic pressures they are attempting to escape from.
March 2, 2014
A Little to academically dry for my tastes, but an interesting book nonetheless. It basically argues that the counterculture ethos of the the 1960's had a profound affect on the libertarian formation of what has come to be called cyberspace. Told in a historical manner with a careful agenda, it is often makes for a fascinating read. But unfortunately, it also gets so caught up in its own brilliance that one gets so frustrated they want to throw the book across the room. Recommended mostly for modern history buffs.....
January 15, 2021
A fascinating look into the history of the internet, centered around the life and times of Stewart Brand. I had not heard of Brand before this book, and feel that the book presents his life in an idealised manner. I found some segments fascinating, whilst others seemed very inconsequential, with many names and connections mentioned that never seemed hugely relevant. Nonetheless, the story, from LSD-fuelled commune trips to burgeoning start of the modern internet, is very interesting, and well worth exploring further.
June 17, 2021
Reboot-core/canon! Really really interesting look at the impact of Stewart Brand's evangelism and the industry's ties to the counterculture
January 6, 2008
If you ever listen to people with advanced degrees in English, you'll hear things like "narrative context", "semiotics", and "the rhetoric of making a difference." For the most part, it's all crap. This book is written by a guy with an advanced degree in English, yet it is completely readable and shows how things like narrative context can lose the scare quotes and actually be important to the way our world develops.
That said, you should have a strong interest in either the counterculture movement of the sixties or the development of nineties cyberculture (especially the Well and Wired magazine) if you plan on picking up this book.
Here is an interview with the author.
That said, you should have a strong interest in either the counterculture movement of the sixties or the development of nineties cyberculture (especially the Well and Wired magazine) if you plan on picking up this book.
Here is an interview with the author.
Read
November 11, 2008This well-written, well-researched book was disappointing to me. Stewart Brand clearly forged important links between the counterculturalism of the 1960s and the libertarian, cyber networks of our time, but Turner fails to make a case for his lasting importance or to demonstrate that our contemporary digital culture would have been significantly different if Brand had never existed. Was Brand a cause or an effect of larger social processes? Turner doesn’t say. Instead, he just chronicle’s Brand’s exploits, leaving the heavy-lifting, social analysis to others.
For my sake, I find Manuel Castell’s work on this topic much richer.
For my sake, I find Manuel Castell’s work on this topic much richer.
August 28, 2014
This is an important book about the culture that existed during the early years of the PC revolution and the creation of the Internet. The focus is on Stewart Brand and his circle, but it branches out a bit to consider the ideas of Norbert Wiener and other theorists. I found the prose to be a bit windy, but the overall message is sound and there is nothing else out there that really addresses these issues in a serious way.
July 9, 2012
I really wanted this book to be better but it just wasn't there. Author writes like a doctoral student and it was a hard book to finish. Very dry which was surprising given the subject. Contained some great anecdotes but overall was very repetitive. A good biography of Stewart Brand would have been much more effective.
January 16, 2014
Pretty interesting summary of how many of the household names of cyberculture got to fame and power. And most of the critique regarding journalistic ethics and libertarianism is also spot on. The writing tends to be a bit dry & repetitive at times, but if you're interested in the history of net culture it's definitely worth a read.
June 14, 2023
Dove right into this after reading John Markoff's "What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry." I appreciated the focus on Stewart Brand as well as the timeline that took us from "The Whole Earth Catalog" to "Wired." Turner and Markoff's books are written for different audiences, the latter more a popular audience, the former more academic. That doesn't excuse the high degree of repetition throughout Turner's book, though, which ultimately seemed to just repeat, rather than significantly develop, the same basic observation.
Turner's book, for its part, was an occasionally fascinating and often troubling read (particularly looking back at this book from 2023 to 2006, just on the other side of the new millennialism that the book sketches out). I think the "digital utopianism" deserved a far stronger critique than we got here, a need more sharply in focus with the rise of social media and the overt alignments evident between social media magnates and authoritarianism and white supremacy. And Turner's approach to libertarian and entrepreneurial values shed light on some of the issues that I see with those desiring to craft out a personal destiny by being influencers and online personalities at the expense of their engagement with the political, social/cultural, and ecological (a pesky triad indeed!) spheres undergoing such monumental stressors in the current moment.
The Stewart Brand through-line was occasionally useful but also not entirely convincing. What the use of Brand does, more than anything, is consolidate the most damaging mythos of Silicon Valley -- that it requires the mythologizing of white male centralized libertarian power-figures/visionaries who show that the decentralized "network" actually tends toward the formation of likeminded power clusters at the expense of social justice, equity, and accessibility. Turner's emphasis on Brand (as tenuous as it sometimes is in the book) merely reinforces this toxic legacy of the computing guru.
Turner's prose often had me glazing over with frequent use of triads in sentences (e.g., "In its meetings, its publications, and its presentations, GBN offered those individuals a vision of the New Economy as a networked entity, open to management by elite social groups and charismatic leaders and linked by interpersonal and informational networks, an entity whose laws could be made visible through a mix of systems theory, collaborative social practice, and mystical insight" (184)), and a tendency to pair things up with an "on the one hand" and "on the other hand." On the one hand, I found myself invested in the book, and on the other, feeling kind of distanced and uninvested in its outcome.
Turner's book, for its part, was an occasionally fascinating and often troubling read (particularly looking back at this book from 2023 to 2006, just on the other side of the new millennialism that the book sketches out). I think the "digital utopianism" deserved a far stronger critique than we got here, a need more sharply in focus with the rise of social media and the overt alignments evident between social media magnates and authoritarianism and white supremacy. And Turner's approach to libertarian and entrepreneurial values shed light on some of the issues that I see with those desiring to craft out a personal destiny by being influencers and online personalities at the expense of their engagement with the political, social/cultural, and ecological (a pesky triad indeed!) spheres undergoing such monumental stressors in the current moment.
The Stewart Brand through-line was occasionally useful but also not entirely convincing. What the use of Brand does, more than anything, is consolidate the most damaging mythos of Silicon Valley -- that it requires the mythologizing of white male centralized libertarian power-figures/visionaries who show that the decentralized "network" actually tends toward the formation of likeminded power clusters at the expense of social justice, equity, and accessibility. Turner's emphasis on Brand (as tenuous as it sometimes is in the book) merely reinforces this toxic legacy of the computing guru.
Turner's prose often had me glazing over with frequent use of triads in sentences (e.g., "In its meetings, its publications, and its presentations, GBN offered those individuals a vision of the New Economy as a networked entity, open to management by elite social groups and charismatic leaders and linked by interpersonal and informational networks, an entity whose laws could be made visible through a mix of systems theory, collaborative social practice, and mystical insight" (184)), and a tendency to pair things up with an "on the one hand" and "on the other hand." On the one hand, I found myself invested in the book, and on the other, feeling kind of distanced and uninvested in its outcome.
August 30, 2020
This is the rare computer-history book that takes a truly critical look at its subjects. It is not your average chronicle of successes and it's not telling us about how its subject is going to save the world. Rather, it takes a look at how networking (as in LinkedIn, not as in Internet) expert Stewart Brand managed to ride the technology rocket to the moon, and shape the discourse around technology into something palatable to his once-commune-dwelling world. It really does what What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry promises on its cover - explores the vaunted connection between Silicon Valley and what he calls the Whole Earth Network, but what is often taken in other accounts to represent a monolithic "counterculture." All of the big names are here: PARC, Homebrew Computer Club, People's Computer Company, but he does not dwell on them, but explains their actual connection to Brand/Whole Earth (if you want those histories, you're better off with Fire in the Valley: The Making of the Personal Computer or Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age.) Really opens your eyes to the idea of legitimacy transfer-a great example of this is where Brand organizes a conference (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hac...) that serves not only to get everyone in Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution into a single building, but also to bring legitimacy and cred to himself and his collaborators.
March 30, 2021
This book is like reading a history of the present written in the past. At least 10 years ahead of its time. I think the author undersells how profound his analysis is, as the tech culture which was permitted by the counterculture has permitted every inch of the knowledge economy, the financial sector and the academy in particular. The author has essentially written historical analysis of the intellectual DNA of the Western (Neo)liberal world. The performative flourishes of Twitter make more sense if you understand the platform itself is embedded with the spirit of the merry pranksters. Also, their lack of desire to censor speech makes much more sense if you view them as the children of the 60s who truly believe that human expression could create new, godlike people liberate through knowledge acquisition. Censorship in that world is more than a betrayal of corporate princiapals, it's a sin. Even the antipathy towards unions makes more sense given they are cast as an extension of the drab, grey, life-denying politics of the white middle class and the failed agonistic politics which brought the Vietnam war, politics you free yourself from first by going to the commune and then by hopping online and becoming enmeshed in cyberspace. Well researched and not a full-throated leftist critique, this seems to have turned some readers off, find the book confusing rather than nuanced. Also people just see bumed out by the relization that hippie counter culture was always holding seeds off of the Cold War techno state which produced it. The truth can be a harsh vibe, I guess. The follow-up I'd love to see is how these counter culture ideologies have permeated the academic/nonprofit worlds, where I imagine many who left the communes went, as well and a deeper analysis of the racism/whiteness of the new communalists. The book hints at the argument that the back to the land movement was essentially another form of "white flight" after the 68 riots and it's this sort of analysis I would have liked to see deeper interogated.
May 31, 2021
Reading about counterculture era, the terms associated would be anti-government, anti-establishment, anti-programming, anti-war. An era of rebellion. It was also the search and desire of freedom; freedom of choice, lifestyle and expression.
Reading this book there are 2 points which are for me to reflect based on my understanding:
"Society is increasing jobless but not workless". It is the description of the gig economy with the redefinition and requirement for full time staff in an organization. While then it was only in small roles and tasks, fast forward to today, with technology as the biggest disruptor to traditional business, who really are the staff? Taxi companies replaced with Uber and other app hailing company as well as Airbnb, the world largest chain of property rental (yet don't employ anyone to handle the physical management of properties and on ground services). It gives me fresh perspective on the unemployment numbers. Yet it is also to know that being paid for work done, means small income for most, a lack of stability and widening of income gap.
The other was about journalism. As the tech group was writing and contribute more into different news channels and publications, it is said they fall well outside the description of professional journalism and its ethics. Reporting and creating news are two different matters. A message to me that the role of journalism and ethics had changed over the years. It is a reminder of ethics of old is not applicable to the world of today and future. This is not limited to journalism. What is of value and ethics today?
Reading this book there are 2 points which are for me to reflect based on my understanding:
"Society is increasing jobless but not workless". It is the description of the gig economy with the redefinition and requirement for full time staff in an organization. While then it was only in small roles and tasks, fast forward to today, with technology as the biggest disruptor to traditional business, who really are the staff? Taxi companies replaced with Uber and other app hailing company as well as Airbnb, the world largest chain of property rental (yet don't employ anyone to handle the physical management of properties and on ground services). It gives me fresh perspective on the unemployment numbers. Yet it is also to know that being paid for work done, means small income for most, a lack of stability and widening of income gap.
The other was about journalism. As the tech group was writing and contribute more into different news channels and publications, it is said they fall well outside the description of professional journalism and its ethics. Reporting and creating news are two different matters. A message to me that the role of journalism and ethics had changed over the years. It is a reminder of ethics of old is not applicable to the world of today and future. This is not limited to journalism. What is of value and ethics today?
January 2, 2021
Going by the number of annotations I made and other works I linked them too, this is one of the best reads I had in the past year or so. It tells what silicon-valley culture became along what Steward Brand did, so to say. Reading other reviews, the language and content seems to split the audience. Among other academic books in the genre of cultural history, the text is really well written. There are few fancy words, the language has a drive forward as the sentences are long but do not require jumping back and forth.
Having said this, the book was such a great source for understanding web/silicon-valley/tech culture better. Sections on the connection of military research and interdisciplinary work; the idea of the world and people as data patterns in cybernetic systems; Fuller’s comprehensive designer (Who is rather similar than todays promises of "Design Thinking"); How individualism and community were thought together (Which is a large influence of the cultures of web communities and open source); the charismatic leaders who did not appear as leaders; the focus on "tools", the imagination of living on a frontier…
If you are interested in this, you might like Turner’s smaller articles like "Burning man at google" (https://fredturner.stanford.edu/wp-co...) and his interviews like "Don’t be evil" in logic mag (https://logicmag.io/justice/fred-turn...)
Having said this, the book was such a great source for understanding web/silicon-valley/tech culture better. Sections on the connection of military research and interdisciplinary work; the idea of the world and people as data patterns in cybernetic systems; Fuller’s comprehensive designer (Who is rather similar than todays promises of "Design Thinking"); How individualism and community were thought together (Which is a large influence of the cultures of web communities and open source); the charismatic leaders who did not appear as leaders; the focus on "tools", the imagination of living on a frontier…
If you are interested in this, you might like Turner’s smaller articles like "Burning man at google" (https://fredturner.stanford.edu/wp-co...) and his interviews like "Don’t be evil" in logic mag (https://logicmag.io/justice/fred-turn...)
December 22, 2019
This is quite a tough read in places, because the author drills down to sometimes challenging ideas, but it’s worth sticking with it. What makes it especially interesting is that it was written after the internet changed society, but before the advent of social media changed the internet. I’d be really interested in his views now of the similarities between the commune movements of the 60s and the online communities of 2019; especially post Cambridge Analytica.
I think he misses his target significantly by focussing on Brand and the creators of Wired and not fully examining the role of the counterculture years on the young Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and the others; the Homebrew Computer club gets a brief mention but that’s it. Apart from his role in The Well Brand really isn’t a leading cyber pioneer to my mind.
Where I think he’s spot on is his understanding that both the counterculture and the computer based society of the early internet years were white, privileged and male, and that it depended, and indeed still depends (despite becoming more diverse) on a large working class to produce the infrastructure on which it exists. Were he writing now he would almost certainly have reflected I suspect that while the internet is as full of women as men, they’re the ones getting pictures of genitalia emailed to them...
I think he misses his target significantly by focussing on Brand and the creators of Wired and not fully examining the role of the counterculture years on the young Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and the others; the Homebrew Computer club gets a brief mention but that’s it. Apart from his role in The Well Brand really isn’t a leading cyber pioneer to my mind.
Where I think he’s spot on is his understanding that both the counterculture and the computer based society of the early internet years were white, privileged and male, and that it depended, and indeed still depends (despite becoming more diverse) on a large working class to produce the infrastructure on which it exists. Were he writing now he would almost certainly have reflected I suspect that while the internet is as full of women as men, they’re the ones getting pictures of genitalia emailed to them...
March 22, 2022
This is an interesting look at part of the career of futurist Stewart Brand. How he want from being involved with out there psychedelic antics of the late 60s to editor of the Whole Earth Catalog for the back to the land communalists in the 70s and founding electronic and journalistic networks in the 80s that lead to the likes of Wired magazine in the 90s.
It is an academic history and focuses on the connections between Brand cybernetic and media ideas and the nascent elements of hacker culture that would be involved in the advent of the personal computer and internet culture. The coverage is often fairly detailed with interviews and other archival sources on the doings of various participants. There is also plenty of commentary about wider historical developments and the complicated politics and aspirations of the various people involved.
I felt that occasionally there were some errors (such as say calling microcomputers minicomputers) that while not particularly egregious made the whole production feel a bit less convincing. Also some of the connections the author attempts to make are a bit speculative and strained.
It is an academic history and focuses on the connections between Brand cybernetic and media ideas and the nascent elements of hacker culture that would be involved in the advent of the personal computer and internet culture. The coverage is often fairly detailed with interviews and other archival sources on the doings of various participants. There is also plenty of commentary about wider historical developments and the complicated politics and aspirations of the various people involved.
I felt that occasionally there were some errors (such as say calling microcomputers minicomputers) that while not particularly egregious made the whole production feel a bit less convincing. Also some of the connections the author attempts to make are a bit speculative and strained.
December 21, 2018
A well-researched profile of Stewart Brand and his cohort, illustrating not only the nuances of the historical connection between communalist strains of the 60s counterculture and internet optimism post-cyberdelia (in a more careful and accurate way than What the Dormouse Said) but the incredible power of Brand's own reputation-building and power-building techniques (which have been more recently replicated by Tim O'Reilley). Made me reconsider a lot of ideas I now realize I had uncritically swallowed from Wired.
It gets four stars instead of five because the prose is dense, businesslike, and somewhat repetitive. If you can stomach dryly-academic books with no stylistic flair, this is a good one.
It gets four stars instead of five because the prose is dense, businesslike, and somewhat repetitive. If you can stomach dryly-academic books with no stylistic flair, this is a good one.
December 13, 2021
This is a really dense and useful book that is rightly cited frequently to explain the libertarian infrastructure of the internet. Turner follows Stewart Brand and others associated with the Whole Earth Catalog through the beginning of "hacker" culture and concludes with the history of Wired magazine. The argument builds slowly, but the final two chapters could probably be read on their own for anyone seeking to get a quick distillation of the argument about the connections between goals of "new communalists" of the 1960s-1970s counterculture, 1990s techno-utopians and the merger of these groups with the anti-regulutory agenda of the New Right.
February 11, 2018
While some of the story around “wired” magazine seemed not atypical of any magazine and there are large areas missing that cover more recent perspectives in Cyberculture this text is very well researched and inspiring in its insight as to the special combination of values that shape Cyberculture.
The rebels against centralisation live in close relationship to the centralised system and its tools. These intrinsic contradictions should get us to appreciate and be ready to accept that the world is always more complicated than our ideas make of it.
The rebels against centralisation live in close relationship to the centralised system and its tools. These intrinsic contradictions should get us to appreciate and be ready to accept that the world is always more complicated than our ideas make of it.
February 2, 2021
Did you know that Brand was the camera guy for Englebart’s mother of all demos? Or that he was the Rolling Stone reporter who loitered around Xerox PARC documenting the slacker / hacker vibe? Or that he was a central figure in Hacker conference, the WELL social network, the back-to-the-land movement, the Merry Pranksters, the Whole Earth Catalog, the Long Now Foundation, and the MIT Media Lab… Or that his former hippie friends pivoted to start Wired Magazine and embrace neoliberalism, falling in with Newt Gingrich et al. It’s all connected, man.
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November 12, 2023Quite repetitive at points, but definitely tracing important and oft overlooked links from the 40's industrial-military-academic complex, 60's countercultural new communalism, and the 90's tech bros and the libertarian new right. It shatters the idea that the new communalist hippies were just anoter flavor of leftists and show how their anti-agonistic and individualistic focus on consciousness expansion led to new computer-oriented variants of the grey bureaucratic systems they once opposed. Now the suits claim to be hip, but are destroying the world all the same.
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