Dave Young Trimester1-Draft

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Draft v0.5

The effects of Norbert Wiener's development of a science of control systems on post-war American society can not be understated: from its early military experiments to its adoption as an information/control system in government, educational institutions, and in business, it altered the way society could be managed by those in positions of power. Named Cybernetics (after the greek word cybernetos, meaning 'steersman'), it essentially became a new method for understanding how information flows through a system. With the computers rapid rise in importance in American society after World War II, Norbert Wiener's cybernetic theories became increasingly influential on society in general. It could be argued that cybernetic theory was both partially a cause of - and eventually solution to – one of the most influential youth movement in America in the 20th century: the countercultural revolution. The Californian hippies were revolting against the rigid systems born out of the Cold War nuclear anxiety that held society in stasis. In order to escape the hierarchies and inequalities of a patriarchal system dominated by corporations and controlled by the media, they believed that society's underlying mechanistic structure had to be disrupted. The resulting revolution was an attempt to reappropriate cybernetic theory and apply it to the creation of new egalitarian social structures, as opposed to the hierarchical systems of control that had dominated America since the war. From this revolution, the computer became both a symbol of Orwellian rationalist control, and an emancipatory tool that would create an egalitarian and democratic society – a contradiction that even today is still unresolved in the collective consciousness of computer culture.

One of the great iconic images from computing history is the photograph of the founders of Microsoft in 1978. Appearing more like a 70s brothers-and-sisters folk band than the beginnings of a corporate giant, the countercultural roots of the company are evident in the bohemian dress of Bill Gates and his fellow team mates. The image illustrates a collision of two seemingly oppositional ideologies: that of the 1960s-70s countercultural revolution that opposed the mega-corporations and dreamt of creating a new utopian society; and our contemporary imagining of Microsoft as one of the biggest companies in the world: a symbol of liberal capitalism, and certainly one of the most influential producers of computer software. While it is perhaps difficult to imagine how these two contrasting worldviews could be closely related, the link between the anti-establishment artisans and multi-millionaire computer industry becomes less surprising considering that California was the base for both the hippie movement that emanated out of San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury District in the late 60s, and American's principal research district for new computer technologies, Silicon Valley.

Despite their clashes in approach, what the early tech-entrepreneurs and the hippie artisans of San Francisco shared was a preoccupation with the control structures being implemented into post-war American society, and moreso, how it could be liberated from them. Much of the counterculture imagined opportunities to create new non-hierarchical social systems governed by the objectivity of the machine, although others feared that the logical conclusion of computers becoming domesticated would be the mechanisation of society, as articulated in Mario Savio's infamous “bodies upon the gears speech” at the University of California in 1964: “There's a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part, you can't even tacitly take part. And you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop. And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all.” (Savio, as quoted by Turner, 2008: 11)

As suggested in Savio's speech, the counterculture as a whole was not explicitly pro-technology – or at least did not foresee technology as being the grand answer to the ills of society. In essence, the common interest that drove the counterculture as a whole was the re-managing of the control systems that they felt were having a negative impact on the development of American society. In Fred Turner's book From Counterculture to Cyberculture, he describes the various countercultural sub-movements who all had their own agendas with relation to achieving the desired changes in society. While the New Left went about trying to achieve these changes through political means, the New Communalists opposed the political system and saw the “key to social change as being the mind.” (Turner, 2008: 36) For the New Communalists, this meant that instead of using Wiener's cybernetic theories to efficiently utilise humans as a mechanical resource as was being done in the factories and mega-offices of corporate America, cybernetics could instead be used to create distributed networks and non-hierarchical systems that would encourage their ideals of collaborative knowledge and egalitarian communities. Acting out these theories in communal-living experiments generally located away from the cities and the throes of capitalism, the New Communalists attempted to create “leaderless” democratic societies, in which all members were supposedly equal in the running of the commune. Through the creation of such autonomous communes in the Californian countryside, they attempted to “rediscover what they imagined to be the pre-industrial forms of intimacy and egalitarian rule.” (ibid.: 37) The movement had a sizeable impact on American culture in general: in the early 70s, over half a million Americans were living in the communes. According to Adam Curtis, “It was one of the biggest migrations in American history.”

Despite the utopian desires of the New Communalists and the relative popularity of the movement, almost all of the communes were a complete failure, with most not lasting more than 6 months. The democratic systems on which the communes were based were inherently flawed, as they did not successfully consider the essence of human nature: that within a group of people, control and power dynamics arise naturally. This idea can be seen on a micro level when looking at the communes, but in fact it was essentially the same phenomenon that the New Communalists were rebelling against in the wider world in the first place. As Adam Curtis writes in the Guardian: “This was the central problem with the concept of the self-regulating system, one that was going to haunt it throughout the 20th century. It can be easily manipulated by those in power to enforce their view of the world, and then be used to justify holding that power stable.”

After the failure of the experimental new communities in the Californian countryside due to hierarchical struggles, the question of control was still firmly on the countercultural agenda, although in this instance, the solution seemed to be in direct opposition to Mario Savio's speech. Many of the New Communalists that returned to the cities attempted to explore how computers could help control social systems. As James Harkin says of the ex-commune dwellers in his book Cyburbia:

"The politics of the counterculture had long been eclipsed, but its central idea of bringing about direct communication between peers outside the reach of authority had survived intact.[...] The aim was to make the electronic ties that they had begun to hold in such high regard coalesce into a network and give rise to a thousand blooming new connections."

Being positioned during a period of intense innovation, the synergy between this ideology and rapid advances in technological possibilities at the time led those inspired by the communes to look at the machine as a democratic communication tool, and perhaps still act on some of the ideas that were behind the countercultural movement in the first place.

The belief that computers would lead society into a new utopian way of living became known as the 'Californian Ideology', coined by Andy Cameron in his 1995 essay of the same title. Cameron describes the Californian technologists as “advocates of an impeccably libertarian form of politics – they want information technologies to be used to create a new 'Jeffersonian democracy' where all individuals will be able to express themselves freely within cyberspace.” (1995: Px) Born out of a heady mix of homebrew computer developers, anti-corporate attitudes, and the belief in social and environmentally-conscientious way of doing business, the Californian Ideology seemed to be a logical development of the various countercultural sub-movements. This utopian worldview doesn't remain entirely without criticism in Cameron's essay. Summarising the Californian Ideology as an “amalgamation of opposites”, he wonders will the technologically-augmented society subscribe to the New Right or the New Left's vision of a utopia: “As a hybrid faith, the Californian Ideology happily answer this conundrum by believing in both visions at the same time – and by not criticising either of them.” For example, the fact that the New Communalists had promoted an egalitarian society within communes that largely consisted of middle-class white Americans illustrates how, in practice, the Californian Ideology could be considered problematic.